THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


Great  Writers 

"^  CERVANTES 

SCOTT  MILTON  VIRGIL 

MONTAIGNE  SHAKSPERE 


GEORGE   EDWARD  WOODBERRY 


NEW  YORK 

THE  McCLURE  COMPANY 

MCMVII 


Copyright,  1007.  by 

THE  McCLURE  COMPANY 

Published,  October,  1007 


2^/^StPv/9f2?^v^S^^v/^?iSv^G'^v^^ 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Cervantes    3 

Scott 39 

Milton c 75 

Virgil Ill 

Montaigne 149 

Shakspere 183 


Great  Writers 


CERVANTES 


Cervantes,  noble  by  blood,  was  bom  poor.  An  infancy  at 
AlcaM  de  Henares,  boyhood  at  Valladolid,  youth  at 
Madrid ;  from  such  early  years  he  emerges  into  the  half 
lights  of  biography  in  the  two  worlds  of  arms  and  let- 
ters. He  was  certainly  the  poet  of  his  school,  for  his  mas- 
ter praised  and  printed  the  verse  of  his  "  dear  and  be- 
loved pupil; "  and  why  should  we  not  believe  he  was  that 
same  Miguel  de  Cervantes,  page  at  court,  who  for  ruf- 
fling there  in  an  affair  of  gallantry  was  condemned  to  ten 
years'  exile  and  to  have  liis  right  hand  cut  off,  and  es- 
caped to  hiding?  'Tis  as  easy  as  deer-stealing.  But 
whether  as  a  cavalier  in  flight,  or  as  a  protege  more 
peacefully  picked  up,  Cervantes  left  Madrid  at  twenty- 
one  in  the  train  of  the  Papal  Ambassador,  Monsignor 
Acquaviva,  a  fortunate  Italian  youth  two  years  his 
senior  and  a  patron  of  art  and  letters;  and,  as  a  gentle- 
man in  attendance  upon  him,  travelled  to  Rome. 

[3] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
There  in  a  city  wliieh  was  still  the  world's  high  caj)i- 
tal  the  young  Spanish  [)rovincial,  half  poet,  half  gallant, 
came  into  touch  with  life  in  the  large.  lie  learned  Ital- 
ian, f  lien  the  master  tongue  of  literature;  in  the  palace  he 
mingled  with  the  most  cultivated  society  of  the  world 
and  heard  much  high-bred  discussion;  he  came  to  rec- 
ognize that  something  barbarous  and  belated  which  for- 
eign  nations  found  in  the  literature  of  his  own  land. 
Cervantes  had  a  soul  capable  of  great  enthusiasms.  At 
Rome,  in  1570,  a  great  cause  was  in  the  air.  It  was  one 
of  the  oldest  of  great  causes.  "A  Crusade!  A  Crusade!" 
was  the  cry.  The  Turks  were  storming  Cyprus;  they 
threatened  Venice;  they  filled  the  African  coast;  they 
held  the  sea.  Was  the  INIediterranean  to  be  a  Turkish 
lake .'  It  appealed  to  Cervantes  because  it  was  a 
Christian  cause,  and  he  was  of  the  "old  Christian 
blood  "  that  for  centuries  had  waged  the  duel  with  the 
Moors,  to  w^hom  the  Turks  were  heirs.  It  appealed  to 
him  because  it  belonged  to  the  glory  of  Spain,  with  her 
vice-royalties  strewn  in  Italy  and  on  the  islands,  to  crush 
the  infidel.  And  it  appealed  to  liim  because  he  was 
young.  Don  John  of  Austria,  whose  figure  stood  out  in 
Southern  Catholic  chivalry  with  a  brilliancy  of  knight- 
hood not  unlike  Sidney's  in  the  Puritan  North,  in  its 
power  to  awake  the  imagination  of  the  generous  and  the 
jealousies  of  the  cold  and  mean,  was  the  leader  of  the 

[4] 


CERVANTES 
cause.  Cervantes's  choice  was  a  foregone  conclusion.  If 
by  the  spirit  he  was  a  writer,  by  the  flesh  he'  was  a  sol- 
dier. In  that  adventurous  age  a  Spaniard,  though  a 
genius,  was  bom  for  roving  and  for  arms.  When  his 
young  patron,  Acquaviva,  following  the  pleasant  Italian 
way,  put  on  the  Cardinal's  hat  at  twenty-four,  Cer- 
vantes left  the  ante-chamber  and  enhsted  in  the  Spanish 
ranks. 

A  year  later,  the  sun  of  Lepanto  breaking,  October  7, 
1571,  the  young  recruit,  sick  and  weak  with  fever,  lay 
below  on  the  galleon,  "Marquesas."  At  noon,  the  fight 
being  on,  he  pleaded  his  duty  against  the  remonstrances 
of  his  comrades,  came  on  deck,  and  was  stationed  by  the 
long  boat  in  command  of  twelve  men.  At  night,  the  fight 
over,  he  lay  there  with  two  gun-shot  wounds  in  the 
breast  and  his  left  hand  shattered.  It  was  a  fruitless  vic- 
tory, men  say  to-day;  then  it  was  the  greatest  sea-fight  of 
the  world.  To  Cervantes  it  remained  his  "  one  crowded 
hour  of  glorious  life."  Five  years  he  was  in  these  wars,  in 
barracks  and  on  campaigns.  He  served  at  Navarino, 
Corfu,  Tunis,  Sardinia,  Sicily,  and  in  Italy  —  one  fair 
last  year  at  Naples.  Don  John  himself  and  the  Sicilian 
^aceroy  bore  testimony  to  his  good  conduct.  He  sailed 
for  home,  was  captured,  taken  to  Algiers,  and  fell  to  the 
spoils  of  a  Greek  renegade  as  a  Christian  slave.  Five 
years  more  he  was  in  these  bonds.  Once  he  was  sold  to 

[5] 


CHEAT  WRITERS 
the  Dey,  Hassan,  for  five  hundred  ducats,  an  interesting 
fact,  the  price  of  a  world-genius  as  a  slave  not  being 
often  quoted. 

His  character  now  shone  conspicuous.  Two  things 
marked  him  out  among  thousands.  He  was  first  in  the 
eyes  of  the  captives  —  to  plan,  to  encourage  and  to  un- 
dertake. He  was  the  central  plotter  of  daring  escapes  for 
liimself  and  his  comrades,  by  twos  and  threes,  and  by 
scores,  by  land  and  by  sea.  He  even  dreamed  of  a  gen- 
eral rising  and  a  Spanish  rescue  of  all  the  sufferers.  Has- 
san said,  "  could  he  preserve  himself  against  the  maimed 
Spaniard,  he  would  hold  safe  his  Christians,  his  ships 
and  his  city."  He  was  first  also  in  the  respect  of  his  mas- 
ters. Repeatedly  detected,  he  refused  to  abandon  his  at- 
tempts; often  threatened  and  with  the  noose  about  his 
neck,  in  the  full  peril  of  such  atrocities  as  he  frequently 
saw  inflicted,  with  unbroken  constancy  he  shielded 
others  and  took  all  danger  on  himself.  Yet  he  was  never 
once  struck.  A  certain  readiness  of  jesting  speech  — 
helped  perhaps,  like  Lamb's,  by  his  stammer  —  seems 
to  have  served  him  at  such  times.  His  security,  neverthe- 
less, is  inexplicable.  A  wilder  tale  than  this  of  his  captiv- 
ity one  does  not  read  in  books  of  reality.  He  was  al- 
ready on  board  ship  for  transportation  to  Constantino- 
ple, when  the  long  efforts  of  his  good  mother,  together 
with  the  aid  of  a  subscription  in  Algiers  among  the  mer- 

[G] 


CERVANTES 
chants  by  the  hands  of  a  Redemptionist  Father,  bought 
his  freedom.  So  the  decamping  court  page  pf  twenty 
came  back  to  Spain  at  thirty-three,  a  crippled  soldier 
and  a  ransomed  slave. 

He  became  a  king's  officer,  a  commissary  to  collect 
stores  for  naval  adventures,  like  that  great  one  of  the 
Armada,  and  a  tax-gatherer.  He  got  embarrassed  with 
courts  and  officers,  a  trusted  agent  defaulted,  and  he  was 
more  than  once  in  prison.  He  had  married  a  wife.  Dona 
Catalina,  not  a  fortune,  but  she  brought  him  —  here 
opens  the  domestic  interior  —  besides  some  vineyards, 
"two  linen  sheets,  one  good  blanket  and  one  worn, 
tables,  chairs,  a  brazier,  a  grater,  several  sacred  images, 
one  cock,  and  forty-five  pullets."  His  house  was  the  gen- 
eral refuge  of  the  women  of  the  family;  there,  in  1605, 
were  Hving  his  wife,  his  natural  daughter,  two  sisters, 
and  a  niece;  the  women  took  in  needlework,  and  Cer- 
vantes himself  by  that  time  had  become  apparently  a 
general  business  agent  and  made  out  papers  for  cus- 
tomers who  called  on  him. 

The  jail,  the  tax  coUectorship,  the  long-suffering  pov- 
erty —  are  they  not  the  familiar  marks  of  that  other  pro- 
fession, the  career  of  letters  ?  "  Pen  never  blunted  lance, 
nor  lance  the  pen,"  he  said;  one  failing,  he  took  the 
other.  Strong  by  nature,  he  cared  for  success,  and  with 
good  sense  he  sought  it  in  the  beaten  track.  He  obeyed 

[7] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
occasions,  he  followed  the  fashion  and  the  market,  he 
tried  all  kinds.  It  was  the  age  of  artificial  sentiment;  and 
he  wrote  a  shepherd  book,  like  Sidney's  "Arcadia,"  a 
tangle  of  intrigue,  rhetoric  and  love-plaining  verse.  It 
was  the  age  of  the  rising  drama;  and  he  tried  the  play, 
staging  realistic  scenes  from  his  life  in  Algiers.  It  was  the 
age  of  the  European  short  story;  and  he  tried  the  tale, 
creating  that  variety  of  it  which  springs  from  direct  ob- 
servation of  manners.  Twenty  years  of  such  labours,  a 
range  from  the  finished  whimsies  of  fashionable  courtly 
fancy  to  the  hard  realism  of  the  thieves'  market,  and  he 
had  not  yet  succeeded ;  but  his  mind  comprised  the  thea- 
tre of  life,  and  he  was  trained  in  all  the  modes  of  literary 
art.  "Don  Quixote,"  when  it  appeared  in  liis  fifty- 
eighth  year,  was  the  book  of  a  wise  old  man.  Its  popular 
success  did  not  bring  him  friends  or  money.  Ten  years 
later  the  second  part  was  issued. 

The  grave  old  man,  on  the  verge  of  seventy,  was  near 
his  end;  a  figure  of  medium  height,  an  oval  face,  with 
chestnut  hair,  a  Roman  nose,  vivid  complexion,  and 
"  the  silvery  beard  that  twenty  years  ago  was  golden  "  — 
so  he  describes  himself.  Though  he  mingled  much  with 
men  all  his  life,  he  appears  in  the  retrospect  singularly 
solitary.  Not  bred  in  the  university,  he  had  never  been 
accepted  by  those  of  the  schools;  he  had  led  an  inde- 
pendent career,  frank  of  speech,  careless  of  enmity,  aloof 

[8] 


CERVANTES 
from  every  clique,  acquainted  with  the  strength  and 
weakness  of  all,  soberly  judging  even  his  young  rival, 
Lope  de  Vega,  the  darling  of  the  age.  No  one  who  saw 
him  moving  with  the  stooped  shoulders  and  the  slow 
gait,  thought  how  future  ages  would  have  prized  some 
living  portrait  of  that  face,  nor  guessed  that  this  stam- 
merer was  the  world- voice  of  Spain;  none  of  the  relig- 
ious brotherhood  he  joined  to  secure  his  funeral  rites,  as 
they  followed  him  "  with  his  face  uncovered,"  a  little  un- 
noticed company,  knew  that  the  greatest  Spaniard  was 
there  consigned  to  an  obscure  and  now  forgotten  grave. 
Cervantes  himself  could  not  have  foreknown  the  na- 
ture of  his  fame.  He  did  not  perceive  the  relative  im- 
portance of  "  Don  Quixote  "  among  his  works.  Not  rec- 
ognizing that  he  had  broken  out  the  modem  path,  he 
went  back  to  the  old  ways.  He  again  sought  the  honours 
of  the  poet  in  his  "Journey  to  Parnassus."  He  fell  in 
with  the  opinion  of  his  friends  that  his  "  Persiles  and 
Sigismunda"  would  reach  "the  extreme  of  possible 
goodness,"  and  be  "  the  best  composed  in  our  language, 
of  books  of  entertainment;"  he  died  still  projecting  a 
sequel  to  his  first  pastoral  romance,  "  Galatea."  He  was 
in  no  haste  to  take  up  and  finish  the  second  part  of 
"Don  Quixote."  Literature  was  in  those  days,  by  the 
standard  of  taste  and  in  tradition,  a  thing  of  refinement, 
elevation,  style,  in  matter  noble,  in  manner  convention- 

[9] 


GREAT  WIUTEKS 
al;  and  the  oonscious  unihition  of  Cervantes  dunf^  to  this 
dying  (lassicisni  for  true  reputation.  "Don  Quixote" 
was  never  planned  to  be  a  great  book.  It  was  "engen- 
dered in  a  prison,"  perhaps  a  by-thought  of  his  mind,  as 
a  parody  of  the  romances  of  cliivalr)'.  Cervantes  was  apt 
to  have  a  purpose  in  liis  writings.  In  his  reahstic  plays  he 
meant  to  bring  home  to  men's  bosoms  that  cause  of  the 
freeing  of  Algiers  which  was  his  only  practical  dream  in 
life  and  lingered  long;  in  his  novels  he  professed  that 
they  were  exemplary  or  moral  tales ;  and  in  "  Don  Qui- 
xote "  he  declared  that  liis  only  aim  was  to  destroy  the 
popular  chivalric  romance  which  he  looked  on  as  a  false 
and  harmful  mode  of  fiction.  In  his  first  sketch  he 
found  it,  perhaps,  vulgar  in  matter  and  barren  in 
topic,  too  slight  a  theme  to  bear  his  genius;  he  tried  to 
heighten  it  by  introducing  independent  tales  either 
wholly  foreign  or  loosely  connected,  and  episodes  of  gal- 
lantry more  closely  yet  carelessly  interwoven  with  the 
main  plot.  The  book  grew  under  his  hand,  and  almost 
changed  its  nature  in  the  second  part,  where  there  is 
nothing  extraneous ;  it  displayed  a  depth  of  type  and  a 
reach  of  discourse  equal  to  the  power  of  any  genius  for 
creation  or  reflection,  and  gathered  to  itself  with  infinite 
variety  the  universal  significance  of  life.  Though  Cer- 
vantes grew  conscious  of  its  intimacy  with  his  own  spirit, 
it  is  only  on  the  last  page  that  he  declares  the  identity  of 

[  10  ] 


CERVANTES 
the  work  with  himself.  He  had  gradually  put  into  it,  sub- 
stantially, all  he  was  —  all  he  had  seen,  all  h6  knew  — 
without  being  aware  of  what  he  had  done  till  it  was 
done;  and,  Uke  Columbus,  he  was  never  fully  aware  of 
what  he  had  done.  "Don  Quixote"  announced  a  new 
age. 

Cervantes  was  not  in  advance  of  his  age.  A  great  book 
greatens  with  time;  and  the  seed-vessels  which  it  con- 
tains Time  rifles,  and  scatters  its  germinal  forces 
throughout  the  world  and  ripens  them  in  the  bosom  of 
a  broad  humanity;  but  the  vitality  of  these  belongs  to  the 
human  spirit  and  is  a  thing  apart  from  the  individuality 
of  the  original  author.  Men  have  found  in  Cervantes  a 
reformer,  a  free-thinker,  a  censor  of  Church  and  State, 
a  modem  pessimist  —  all  the  vexed  brood  of  restless 
spirits  of  the  latter  days.  He  was  none  of  these.  He  was  a 
man  of  his  country  and  age,  and  accepted  the  world  as  it 
was  about  him.  He  observed  its  elements,  its  operations 
—  summed  the  general  result  of  life;  but  he  had  no 
thought  of  changing  what  was.  The  idea  of  change,  the 
revolutionary  idea,  was  out  of  his  ken.  Cervantes  was 
part  and  parcel  of  the  present,  whole  with  his  time;  a 
loyal  subject,  a  true  Catholic.  He  approved  of  the  expul- 
sion of  the  Moors.  He  had  a  liberal  outlook  on  the  for- 
eign world,  shown  especially  by  his  fair  words  for  Eng- 
land, Spain's  foe;  and  at  home  he  saw  the  political  and 

[11] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
even  the  ecclesiastical  organization  as  human  institu- 
tions subject  to  defect  in  persons,  means  and  all  their 
temporalities;  if  divinely  instituted,  they  were  humanly 
constituted.  Institutional  life  he  saw  in  its  right  propor- 
tions as  a  part  of  fixed  mortal  routine,  belonging  essen- 
tially in  the  material  sphere  —  the  body  politic,  the 
body  ecclesiastic.  He  was  concerned  with  life  in  other 
phases.  He  was  a  natural  critic;  judgment  was  one  of  his 
principal  gifts,  shown  not  only  in  minor  literary  notices 
that  stud  the  way,  but  in  the  large  in  those  discourses 
which  riclily  interweave  the  narrative  or  arise  out  of  the 
dialogue,  turning  eloquently  to  monologue  under  the 
flame  of  thought;  and  in  the  creative  parts  he  was  a  critic 
of  life.  He  was  a  great  critic  of  life  just  because  he  had 
no  ulterior  aim  either  reformatory  or  humanitarian.  Not 
the  practical  modification  of  life,  not  life  in  the  prospect, 
but  its  imaginative  contemplation,  life  in  the  retrospect, 
was  his  sphere.  It  is  an  old  man's  book.  To  him  life 
was  externally  a  spectacle,  and  in  himself  a  function; 
as  a  function  it  had  been  a  gradually  disillusioning 
enthusiasm;  as  a  spectacle  it  had  become  an  increasing 
irony.  An  enthusiastic  youth  is  apt  to  be  followed  by  an 
ironical  old  age.  In  the  South,  especially,  young  passion 
begot  these  pleasant  ironies  of  later  years,  and  the 
Mediterranean  literature,  except  in  the  greatest,  is  well 
divided  between  young  passion  and  old  irony,  whose 

[  1-  ] 


CERVANTES 
blend  in  "  Don  Quixote  "  attains  to  greatness.  Its  chance 
"  engendering  in  a  prison  "  is  in  itself  ironical ;  its  destiny 
to  enthrall  the  world  is  the  very  fatalism  of  the  grotesque 
in  life.  A  madman  and  a  fool,  a  horse  and  ass,  seeking 
adventures  in  a  world  as  it  is,  go  faring  forth  on  the 
great  empty  Spanish  plains:  what  mortal  interest  can 
there  be  in  their  doings  or  their  fate  ? 

"  Don  Quixote  "  is  the  book  of  Spain.  Its  theatre  is  the 
Spanish  land.  It  is  a  book  of  the  open  air  and  the  broad 
world.  It  has  for  landscape  the  burning  plains,  the  deso- 
late romantic  mountains,  the  strip  of  blue  by  the  coast; 
its  outlook  is  along  the  Mediterranean  world  by  the 
highway  of  the  islands  that  Cervantes  had  travelled  in 
youth,  whence  men  came  back  with  tales  of  sea-fight  and 
captivity;  on  the  long  Northern  edge  lay  Protestantism 
like  a  high  mountain  range,  and  its  over-sea  horizons 
stretched  away  to  Peru  and  the  Indies.  It  is  a  book  writ- 
ten in  Spain  as  from  the  centre  of  the  world,  and  this 
Spain  was  filled  with  its  own  folk;  the  race-mark  of 
"the  old  Christian  blood,"  of  dark-skinned  Moor  and 
gipsy  was  stamped  on  them ;  they  came  forth  in  all  their 
variety  of  life,  hidalgo,  bourgeoise,  picaresque,  ducal, 
provincial,  intellectual,  young  and  old,  good  and  bad, 
soldier,  student,  and  priest,  innkeepers,  criminals, 
players,  peasants,  lovers,  highwaymen,  barbers,  car- 
riers, judges,  officials,  doctors,  menagerie-men,  dam- 

[13] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
scls,  duennas  —  an  endless  list.  Scarce  any  book  has  so 
many  people  in  it.  This  ma.ss  is  put  in  constant  move- 
ment which  gives  unwearied  liveliness  to  the  scene.  It  is 
a  book  of  life  on  the  road.  All  the  world  is  en  voyage. 
The  galley  slaves  are  tliere;  even  the  dead  are  going  a 
journey.  The  delineation  of  manners  is  on  the  national 
scale.  Only  the  high  dignitaries  of  Church  and  State  are 
exempt  from  the  general  conscription.  The  Court  and 
the  great  ecclesiastics  are  not  seen,  but  their  absence 
only  proves  how  small  a  part  exalted  officials  have  in 
constituting  the  character  of  a  people.  The  Spanish  folk 
is  represented  in  its  racial  life  without  them,  and  the 
portrayal  is  nationally  complete.  Cervantes  deals  with 
this  multitude  easily,  taking  them  individually  and  a 
few  at  a  time.  It  is  a  book  of  short  flights,  of  incidents 
lightly  dovetailed,  of  scenes  strung  together,  of  combi- 
nations rapidly  formed  and  dissolved.  The  characters 
are  seized  like  Holbein's  in  the  "  Dance  of  Death,"  only 
here  the  dramatic  moments  are  as  various  as  the  mani- 
fold situations  of  the  li\ing  range  of  human  affairs;  the 
pictures  and  groupings  are  nevertheless  on  a  similar 
limited  scale,  momentary  and  shifting,  and  each  person 
is  characterized  with  his  own  habit  of  life,  caught  in  his 
own  world,  and  shown  completely  in  a  few  strokes.  How 
many  such  small  scenes  crowd  to  the  memory!  The 
muleteer  trolling  the  snatch  of  Roncesvalles  in  the  dark 

[U] 


CERVANTES 
morning  of  El  Toboso ;  the  student  singing  on  his  way  to 
the  wars,  the  puppet-show,  the  Hon,  and  in  low  life,  the 
disasters  of  the  night  at  the  inn;  innumerable  vivid 
sketches !  Thus  the  book  is,  by  its  surface,  representative 
of  all  Spain,  of  the  look  of  the  land,  the  figures  of  the 
people,  the  daily  event  and  business  of  life.  But  it  ex- 
ceeds the  mere  flat  pictorial  method.  It  is  more  richly 
bodied  forth. 

About  all  this  panorama  there  is  what  gives  wholeness 
to  life.  There  is  a  world-perspective  of  the  larger  pres- 
ent, that  secular  environment  of  contemporaneity  found 
in  Shakspere's  plays,  and  here  signified  by  means  of  the 
continuous  inroad  of  the  Turkish  power  into  the  story. 
There  is  a  historical  background,  most  clearly  reflected 
in  the  popular  knowledge  of  chivalric  romance,  and  in 
the  fact  that  every  one  knows  of  chivalry  and  each  char- 
acter, no  matter  how  humble,  takes  up  a  natural  and  in- 
stantaneous attitude  towards  Don  Quixote  almost  as  if 
he  were  an  expected  guest.  Tlie  blend  of  ballad  history 
with  this  romance  helps  the  effect.  Tliis  whole  Spanish 
folk  inhabits  knightly  ground,  and  preserves  its  tradi- 
tion and  sentiment.  There  is  also  an  emotional  fond,  a 
part  of  national  character,  interpreted  here  by  the  inces- 
sant gallantry  of  love  in  operatic  episodes,  by  the  shep- 
herds, the  serenades,  the  runaways,  the  youthfulness  of 
love,  its  sentimental  sufferings,  the  folly  of  its  escapades, 

[15] 


GHKAT  WRITERS 
all  its  charms  and  senselessness.  And  there  are  in  the 
Spanish  nature  of  the  hook  qualities  more  abstractly 
felt  —  intrigue  and  trick,  ceremonial,  grandiloquence, 
boasting,  gullibility,  mendacity,  coarseness,  cruelty  — 
human  qualities  all,  but  here  with  their  Spanish  physi- 
ognomy. "  Don  Quixote, "  even  in  its  national  aspects,  is 
a  book  that  has  all  the  dimensions  of  life,  personal,  geo- 
graphical, historical,  emotional,  moral.  It  sweats  Spain 
as  an  olive  does  oil. 

But  all  this  is  only  the  environment  of  the  action  and 
the  means  of  its  operation  in  the  tale.  Cervantes  knew  a 
more  admirable  way  of  setting  forth  the  soul  of  Spain. 
It  is  not  merely  because  Don  Quixote  and  Sancho  are 
always  on  the  scene  that  they  surpass  the  other  charac- 
ters in  power  of  interest  ;  they  have  a  higher  life. 
Cervantes  stamped  the  genius  of  the  race  by  a  double 
die,  on  the  loftier  and  the  humbler  side;  noble  and 
peasant,  the  mad  hidalgo  and  the  deluded  boor,  divide 
between  them  the  spiritual  realm  of  Spain.  The  illu- 
sion of  the  one,  the  duping  of  the  other  only  intensify 
their  racial  traits  and  perfect  them.  Character  is  deeper 
than  circumstance,  and  owns  a  superiority  over  all  the 
world  of  appearances.  If  Don  Quixote  is  at  first  interest- 
ing for  what  happens  to  him  as  is  the  way  of  life,  he  be- 
comes of  interest  for  what  he  is ;  and  the  same,  though  in 
an  inferior  degree,  is  true  of  Sancho.   Don  Quixote 

[16] 


CERVANTES 
achieves  his  ideal  in  his  soul,  however  badly  he  fares 
with  fortune  in  the  outer  world.  He  is  complete  in  true 
knighthood,  and  when  his  madness  leaves  him  it  cannot 
take  away  the  nobility  of  nature  which  it  has  brought 
the  poor  gentleman  whom  it  found  nameless  and  unoc- 
cupied on  his  little  estate  and  made  one  of  the  world's 
heroes.  The  vocabulary  of  moral  praise  cannot  exhaust 
his  virtues.  He  is  brave,  resolute,  courteous,  wise,  kind, 
gentle,  patient;  and,  not  to  continue  the  enumeration,  he 
possesses  these  traits  with  a  distinctive  Spanish  excel- 
lence. What  tenacity  there  is  in  his  resolution,  what 
recklessness  in  his  courage,  what  fatalistic  sweetness  in 
his  resignation,  what  endurance  in  a  land  of  lost  causes, 
what  sadness  of  defeat  accepted  in  the  quiet  of  adver- 
sity!  If  these  are  not  the  most  obvious,  they  are  perhaps 
the  deepest  Spanish  traits  in  the  noble  natures  of  that 
birth  and  soil.  In  Sancho,  faithful,  affectionate,  dubious, 
nationality  has  lower  relief,  since  he  shares  more  simply 
the  universal  peasant  nature  of  the  South,  but  he  is  as 
abundantly  Spanish  in  his  peasanthood  as  Don  Quixote 
in  his  sublimated  chivalry.  Both  were  fooled  to  the  top 
of  their  bent;  but  destiny  did  not  mistake  her  way;  by 
comedy  she  perfected  them,  each  in  his  own  kind.  It  does 
not  matter  what  happens  to  the  battered  body  of  Don 
Quixote  any  more  than  to  his  crazy  armour;  in  him  the 
soul 's  the  thing,  and  Cervantes  keeps  his  soul  invulner- 

[17] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
able  and  undishonoured.  The  dignity  of  the  virtue  of  the 
great  qualities  of  the  Spanish  ideal  is  preserved  as  well 
as  set  forth,  and  is  seconded  by  the  humbler  virtue  of  the 
life  near  to  the  soil.  No  nation  has  cast  ideal  types  of  it- 
self more  summary,  exemplary  and  real. 

Later  ages  have  seen  in  Don  Quixote  a  typifying  pow- 
er even  more  profound,  and  far  beyond  the  reach  of 
Cerv^antes  to  know,  as  no  one  can  know  the  depths  of  his 
own  personality.  Don  Quixote  was  a  man  of  the  past, 
bringing  outworn  arms  against  a  changed  world.  Spain 
is  a  backward  nation,  ill-furnished  for  modem  times. 
Other  lands  have  persisted  in  seeing  in  Spain  the  Don 
Quixote  of  nations,  whose  Hfe  was  a  dream  of  past 
glory,  whose  thoughts  and  appliances  were  antiquated, 
whose  career  in  the  modem  world  must  be  foredoomed. 
So  they  saw  her  set  forth  lately  in  full  tilt  in  the  lists 
against  the  best  equipped,  the  most  modem,  the  young- 
est of  the  nations  of  the  earth.  But  what  unconscious 
penetration  there  was  in  that  man's  genius,  what  depth 
of  truth,  whose  embodiment  of  the  Spanish  ideal  has  be- 
come the  synonym  of  his  country's  fate! 

As  the  book  of  Spain,  in  the  external  and  to  some  ex- 
tent in  the  internal  sense,  "  Don  Quixote  "  was  fed  from 
the  active  life  of  Cervantes  in  his  goings  up  and  down  in 
the  country  as  a  tax-gatherer  and  his  journeys  as  a 
young  soldier  on  the  sea.  He  had,  however,  another  and 

[18] 


CERVANTES 
perhaps  more  engaging  life  in  the  world  of  books.  He 
was  as  full  of  ideas  as  of  experience.  He  was' a  scholar; 
and  using  this  side  of  his  nature  he  made  his  work  as  ex- 
pressive of  the  literary  power  of  Spain  as  it  was  repre- 
sentative of  her  active  genius.  "  Don  Quixote  "  was  liter- 
ary in  its  origin,  a  crusade  by  parody  against  a  particu- 
lar kind  of  literature;  and,  besides,  the  hero  became  a 
knight-errant  through  the  reading  of  books,  and  he  re- 
tained on  his  adventures  that  interest  in  literature  of  all 
kinds  which  makes  the  book  as  much  one  of  letters  as  of 
arms.  All  varieties  of  Hterature  used  in  Spain  are  to  be 
found  in  it  either  in  examples  or  by  allusion  and  criti- 
cism, and  not  only  those  of  native  growth  but  some  of 
foreign  extraction,  Italian  and  Arabic.  The  chronicle, 
the  romance,  the  pastoral  are  everywhere  present;  verse 
in  many  forms,  comic  and  serious;  the  tale  of  the  Boc- 
cacio  type,  and  the  realistic  tale;  the  old  Renaissance  de- 
bate between  arms  and  letters,  and  those  discourses 
which  are  little  highly  finished  essays  of  a  not  unlike 
sort;  drama  and  poetry  are  also  present  in  elaborate  ex- 
amination of  their  theory  and  practice,  and  the  whole 
question  of  diction  both  by  example  and  precept;  and 
there  is  much  specific  criticism  of  authors  and  books. 
The  ballad  and  the  proverb,  characteristically  Spanish 
kinds,  underlie  the  book,  and  the  style  includes  all  the 
scale  from  the  homeliest  and  coarsest  to  the  most  artifi- 

[19] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
cial,  ornate  and  resonant  known  to  fancy  and  conceit. 
Ccrvantcs's  interest  in  all  these  forms,  methods  and 
questions  is  of  the  liveliest.  Literature  was  in  an  unset- 
tled state,  a  period  of  experiment,  change  and  learning. 
He  was  himself  two-natured.  On  the  one  hand  he  was 
breaking  out  new  ways  by  sheer  impulse,  coming  near 
to  life  in  his  plays,  nearer  in  his  novels,  nearest  of  all  in 
"  Don  Quixote,"  and  using  plain  prose  with  perfection 
for  directness,  vividness  and  truth;  on  the  other  hand  he 
was  charmed  by  the  academic  traditions  of  the  Renais- 
sance in  topic,  sentiment,  imaginative  method,  language, 
poetry,  and  in  the  greater  part  of  his  writings  emulated 
it.  His  entire  works  exhibit  the  whole  range  of  Uterature 
in  his  time;  "Don  Quixote"  shows  it  substantially,  in 
epitome. 

"  Don  Quixote  "  thus  comes  to  have  one  of  the  high 
distinguishing  traits  of  literary  greatness;  it  is  one  of 
those  remarkable  books  which  are  watersheds  of  litera- 
ture. It  looks  before  and  after.  Toward  the  past  it  slopes 
back  on  the  forests  of  chivalry  and  the  glades  and  hills 
of  the  pastoral,  and  it  is  clothed  with  the  power  of  poetry 
in  one  or  another  mode  of  its  various  magic ;  and  it  rolls 
on  to  the  land  of  the  future  in  its  realism,  its  humour,  its 
direct  contact  with  life  as  it  is,  its  recognition  of  the  pop- 
ular lot,  of  common-sense,  of  positive  things,  and  here 
it  is  clothed  with  the  power  of  prose  in  one  or  another 

[  '^0  ] 


CERVANTES 
mode  of  its  modem  efficiency.  Cervantes  could  not  know 
this;  his  conscious  ambition,  unable  to  emancipate  itself 
from  the  bonds  of  the  long-loved  and  still  glorious  tradi- 
tion, harked  back  to  the  ways  of  the  past,  but  his  genius 
always  struck  out  for  the  future  with  the  instinct  of  a 
wild  creature  that  has  mysterious  knowledge  of  its  own 
paths;  his  genius  struck  for  realism,  for  humour,  for 
prose,  out  toward  the  modern  world.  The  poetic  irony 
of  chivalry  had  been  attempted  in  the  old  way  and  suc- 
cessfully accomplished  by  Ariosto,  and  other  Italians, 
and  their  work  ended  an  age ;  they  belong  to  the  Renais- 
sance past.  The  solvent  which  Cervantes  applied  to 
chivalry  was  another  irony,  the  irony  of  the  living  and 
actual  world,  the  irony  of  prose;  hence  "Don  Quixote" 
is  said  to  begin  modern  literature,  and  the  greatest  of 
our  Northern  novelists,  Fielding,  Scott,  Victor  Hugo,  to 
name  no  others,  have  taken  alms  of  Cervantes's  genius. 
Notwithstanding  the  brilliancy  of  the  exploit  —  Cer- 
vantes, like  Columbus,  finding  the  new  world  that  men 
of  another  race  and  nations  of  a  later  destiny  were  to 
possess  —  the  Spanish  literary  genius  in  "  Don  Quixote  " 
is  mainly  reminiscent.  Though  the  modem  child  was 
bom,  it  lay  in  an  antique  cradle,  in  an  environment  of 
the  past.  Cervantes  loved  the  old  romances  which  he 
destroyed  as  Plato  loved  the  poets  whom  he  exiled.  He 
had  a  soul  that  felt  the  swell  of  great  enterprises;  he 

[21] 


GREAT  WH ITERS 
knew  the  spell  of  tlie  lonely  deed  of  high  emprize  ap- 
pealing to  individual  prowess,  the  call  of  the  adventure 
reserved  for  the  destined  knight.  Who  doubts  that  in 
that  passage  where,  the  priest  speaking  of  Turkish 
troubles,  Don  Quixote  makes  his  dark  suggestion,  Cer- 
vantes is  smiling  at  his  own  heart  ?  "  Were  they  alive 
now,"  says  Don  Quixote  "  (in  an  evil  hour  for  me  —  1 
will  not  speak  of  any  else)  the  famous  Don  Belianis  or 
some  one  of  those  of  the  innumerable  progeny  of  Ama- 
dis  of  Gaul !  If  any  of  them  were  living  to-day,  and  were 
to  confront  the  Turk,  i'  faith,  I  could  not  answer  for 
the  consequences.  God  understands  me,  and  I  say  no 
more."  This  had  been  Cervantes's  dream  —  the  freeing 
of  Algiers ;  and  had  Philip  given  him  a  fleet,  doubtless  he 
could  have  done  it;  but  Philip  had  other  thoughts,  and 
Cervantes  shrugged  his  old  shoulders,  and  smiled  at  his 
self-confidence  of  earlier  days.  Cervantes  loved  the  pas- 
toral, too,  and  the  serenade  and  all  the  dear  old-fash- 
ioned pleasures,  the  guitar  and  the  high-sounding  words; 
though  set  in  a  humorous  situation  the  eloquent  dis- 
course of  Don  Quixote  on  the  golden  age  gives  the  true 
note  of  the  literary  heart.  Cer\'antes  was  pouring  himself 
into  his  book,  and  all  these  loves  went  along  with  him  — 
a  poet's,  a  scholar's,  a  lover's,  as  well  as  a  humourist's 
loves.  He  was  no  young  novice,  without  a  past  and 
life-affections  of  the  mind ;  the  wine  ripening  in  his  tern- 

[29] 


CERVANTES 
perament  was  mellowed  from  the  stock  of  the  world's 
old  books.  If  he  had  clothed  Don  Quixote  with  some 
shadows  of  Amadis,  he  knew  that  Sancho,  too,»had  his 
Uterary  ancestry  in  Italy  and  remote  Provence.  Spain 
was  not  only  a  body  of  contemporary  manners  and 
events;  it  had  a  soul  of  poets  dead  and  gone,  a  various 
and  rich  literary  tradition,  gathered  and  exemplified  in 
these  flowing  pages.  "  Don  Quixote  "  is  a  book  of  arms 
and  the  active  life,  but  it  is  also  a  book  of  letters  and  the 
scholarly  life ;  either  alone  had  been  but  half  the  man ; 
together,  body  and  soul,  they  make  up  the  world's  most 
wonderful  national  book  in  prose  —  the  one  that  is  all 
Spain. 

"Don  Quixote"  was  welcomed  by  foreign  nations, 
but  not  altogether  as  a  foreigner.  It  is  a  European  book. 
Cervantes,  besides  what  the  genius  of  his  race  and 
country  gave  him,  received  a  gift  from  destiny.  He  em- 
bodied a  great  moment  of  time,  the  passing-hour  of  the 
old  European  ideal.  It  was  a  living  ideal,  that  of  cliivalry. 
It  was  sprung  from  real  conditions,  and  greatly  ruled  the 
minds  and  somewhat  the  lives  of  men  through  a  long  era. 
It  belonged  to  a  world  of  social  disorder,  the  thinly  pop- 
ulated, scarce  reclaimed  wilderness  of  feudal  Europe; 
it  belonged,  too,  to  a  world  of  marvel,  where  the  un- 
known even  in  geography  was  a  large  constituent  ele- 
ment, and  magic,  superstition  and  devildom  were  so  rife 

[23] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
as  to  be  almost  parts  of  the  human  mind;  but  such  as  it 
found  the  world,  there  this  ideal  moved  with  power. 
The  military  spirit  never  took  form  more  nobly  than  in 
this  cliivalric  type.  It  combined  and  reconciled  two  of 
the  greatest  motive  powers  in  the  human  spirit ;  the  idea 
of  sacrifice  and  the  force  of  self-assertive  personality. 
The  perfect  knight  would  die  for  his  faith,  his  loyalty 
and  his  love,  but  he  died  in  battle.  The  reality  of  this 
ideal  is  shown  by  the  depth,  the  richness  and  the  long 
continuance  of  its  appeal  to  the  bosoms  of  men.  The 
idea  of  rescue,  generated  from  mediaeval  misery  and 
helplessness  in  an  environment  of  brutal  physical  force, 
is  its  ethical  core;  but  its  efflorescence  in  the  imagina- 
tion of  men  was  as  many-coloured  as  a  sun.  Beginning 
in  the  British  waste  marshes  and  the  Frankish  Court,  it 
annexed  the  farthest  Orient  to  the  forests,  deserts  and 
seas  of  its  adventures ;  it  re-made  the  genealogies  of  his- 
tory and  drew  all  the  great,  emperors  and  saints  ahke, 
into  the  lives  of  its  parentage;  it  absorbed  into  its  o^\ti 
tradition  all  past  heroic  excellence.  It  developed  a  cere- 
monial ritual;  it  gathered  to  itself  the  mighty  power  of 
symbolism  in  its  most  august  and  passionate  forms;  it 
gave  forth  a  great  legendary  literature,  one  of  the  richest 
products  of  human  effort  and  faith,  written  in  every 
European  tongue  and  splendid  with  the  deeds  of  every 
soil.  In  the  fulness  of  time,  Arthur  and  Roland  receding, 

[24] 


CERVANTES 
it  was  Amadis  who  was  the  star  of  chivalry.  Amadis's 
tale,  though  now  out  of  the  way,  was  once  the  book  of 
Europe.  It  had  a  spell  to  hold  the  finest  spirits,  hke  Sid- 
ney's, and  appealed  to  them  directly  and  intimately  as 
the  mirror  of  their  hearts  and  hopes.  It  contained  the 
European  mood  of  knighthood  in  its  last  beauty  before 
its  near  eclipse  and  sudden  dimming.  Cervantes  loved 
and  honoured  it,  and  its  hero  was  Don  Quixote's  ideal 
man,  as  he  had  been  of  thousands  of  the  dying  cult. 
Such  was  the  nature  of  the  literature  which  Cenantes 
"smiled  away."  For  that  had  happened  to  the  burning 
faith  of  chivalry  which  is  the  fate  of  all  the  gods ;  at  first 
men  are  overawed  by  them  and  worship,  then  they  hft 
equal  eyes  to  them  and  find  them  companions  of  life ;  and 
last  they  laugh  at  them.  The  laughter  of  men  at  chivalry 
had  already  filled  the  world  from  the  hps  of  Italy  before 
Cervantes  came.  In  his  day  chivalry  was  dead  and 
buried.  The  madness  of  Don  Quixote  was  but  its  ghost, 
wandering  in  the  staring  daylight  of  a  new  age,  forlorn, 
ridiculous,  without  place  or  use  in  the  world. 

The  pastoral,  which  was  a  later  growth,  was  comple- 
mentary to  the  chivalric  romance,  and  by  its  means  fem- 
inine elements  entered  into  the  simple  manhood  of  the 
knightly  type  and  softened  its  humanity.  Its  affiliations 
were  Renaissance,  as  those  of  chivalry  were  mediaeval, 
and  it  appropriated  easily  the  grace,  the  sentiment  and 

[25] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
the  emotional  luxury  of  the  reborn  classic  ideal.  It  sur- 
vived the  true  chivalric  mood,  and  lingered ;  in  "  Don 
Quixote"  it  is  not  less  omnipresent  than  chivalry,  but  is 
less  obviously  ridiculed,  more  lightly  satirized,  more 
tenderly  treated;  it  is  related  to  chivalry,  in  the  composi- 
tion, as  sentimental  to  comic  opera,  but  both  are  alike 
out  of  date  and  discarded  moods  living  only  in  parody, 
wliich  is  in  literature  the  last  stage  of  extinction.  The 
passing  of  the  pastoral  dream,  however,  is  subordinate 
and  not  comparable  to  the  death  of  the  chivalric  ideal; 
in  "  Don  Quixote  "  it  is  the  latter  that  strikes  the  tragic 
note.  Whether  Cervantes  was  himself  conscious  of  this 
note  of  tragedy  in  his  work  must  remain  forever  obscure; 
if  he  was  aware  of  it,  he  very  successfully  concealed  liis 
knowledge.  He  began  with  pure  comic  intention  and 
made  fun  of  the  chivalric  tradition,  and  very  rough  fun 
it  was,  nor  did  it  grow  less  rough.  His  treatment  of  the 
knight  is  not  free  from  coarseness,  and  is  unremitting  in 
cruelty;  here  are  the  standards  of  the  practical  joker  and 
the  buffoon-stage;  but  it  may  be  usefully  remembered 
that  Cervantes's  scale  of  cruelty  in  life  was  one  familiar 
with  the  ways  of  the  Turk  and  the  pains  of  the  Christian 
victims  in  Algiers.  Primarily  a  comedy  by  its  conception 
and  unflinching  conduct,  "  Don  Quixote  "  gave  out  the 
note  of  tragedy  only  in  our  own  latter  days.  In  this  as- 
pect, it  is  a  myth  of  the  modem  mind,  which  has  taken 

[26] 


CERVANTES 
on  new  meanings  and  disclosed  fresh  phases  of  signifi- 
cance with  time,  as  is  the  way  of  myths;  with  this  Cer- 
vantes had  nothing  to  do.  As  he  did  not  see  in  his  hero 
the  incarnation  of  his  country's  fate,  neither  did  he  see  in 
him  the  last  and  greatest  of  knight-errants.  He  did  not 
look  with  our  eyes;  and  it  is  only  through  the  perspec- 
tive of  centuries  that  we  recognize  the  historic  moment, 
and  discern  the  famous  knight,  a  great-lwarted  gentle- 
man, standing  in  his  travesty  at  the  grave  of  chivalry. 

The  unconscious  element,  or  what  seems  such,  in  the 
works  of  the  highest  genius,  is  their  most  immortal  part. 
There  is  a  mystical  union  of  the  race  with  these  great 
works ;  they  are  humanized  as  much  by  the  adoption  of 
mankind  as  by  their  original  creation.  The  general  hu- 
man spirit  enters  into  them;  they  blend  with  it  and  be- 
come impersonal ;  in  the  large  results  of  time  —  in  myth- 
ologies, in  the  legend  of  chivalry,  in  the  masterpieces  of 
culture  —  they  become  racial  products,  unindebted  to 
individuals.  It  is  thus  that  "Don  Quixote"  is  enfran- 
chised from  being  the  book  of  a  country  or  of  a  historic 
moment  merely,  and  becomes  a  great  book  of  the  mod- 
ern spirit.  It  rises  with  the  vigour  of  world-life  in  it,  and 
bears  the  supreme  title  of  a  book  of  humanity.  It  con- 
tains the  experience,  the  thought,  the  doubt  of  man. 
This  comedy  is  found  to  be  the  tragedy  of  all  idealism. 
If  this  is  not  the  aspect  under  which  it  has  most  widely 

[27] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
spread  as  a  hook  of  popular  aimiscment,  it  is  thus  tliat  it 
has  most  profoundly  .'ifTcctcd  the  mind  of  modem  times. 
Mephistopheles  and  Don  Quixote  are  the  two  great 
myths  that  the  modem  world  has  generated  out  of  itself, 
as  characteristic  as  Achilles  in  Homeric  time  or  Roland 
in  the  middle  ages  or  Amadis  in  the  Renaissance.  They 
are  forms  of  its  deepest  consciousness,  t}^es  created  in 
its  own  image,  planets  cast  from  its  own  orb.  The  mod- 
em world  is  psychological,  and  this  book  contains  a 
psychology  seemingly  as  elementarj'  and  comprehensive 
as  a  law  of  nature;  it  is  sceptical,  and  this  book  utters,  as 
no  other  does,  the  double  entendre  of  life;  it  is  pessimis- 
tic, and  this  book  makes  the  most  destructive  impeach- 
ment of  hfe.  Doubtless  one  goes  far  from  Cer\'antes  in 
such  thoughts;  but  if  he  did  not  fathom,  we  may  well  be- 
lieve that  he  felt  the  deeper  meanings  of  his  book,  for 
even  in  the  eyes  of  the  comedian  it  is  a  book  of  much 
sadness. 

The  double  nature  of  life  is  put  to  the  fore.  There  is 
an  opposition  in  human  nature,  and  this  is  set  forth  by 
the  contrast  of  Don  Quixote  and  Sancho.  It  is  rendered 
in  them  by  divers  ways  as  the  antithesis  of  the  imagina- 
tion with  the  senses,  of  the  life  of  thought  with  the  life  of 
fact,  of  illusion  with  reahty,  of  the  eloquent  discourse 
with  the  proverb,  of  the  poetry  with  the  prose  of  Ufe; 
but,  essentially,  this  polarity  is  in  the  double  aspect  of 

[28] 


CERVANTES 
life  as  soul  and  sense.  Cervantes  decides  for  neither;  he 
presents  both  as  Hable  to  error.  He  portrays  Don  Quix- 
ote with  the  characteristic  defect  of  the  soul,  imagina- 
tive illusion;  and  he  gives  to  Sancho  the  characteristic 
defect  of  the  material  man,  self-interest.  The  higher 
nature  betrayed  by  its  own  nobility,  the  lower  duped  by 
its  own  baseness  —  that  is  the  two-edged  sword  of  life. 
That  is  the  human  comedy. 

It  is  in  the  madness  of  Don  Quixote  that  the  heart  of 
the  book  beats.  It  is  a  very  singular  madness.  The  inven- 
tion manifested  in  the  narrative  is  generally  thought  to 
be  its  prime  literary  trait;  but  its  verisimilitude,  the 
skill  with  which  it  keeps  the  quaking  edge  of  truth  and 
fiction,  is  as  marvellous;  and  nowhere  more  than  in  Don 
Quixote's  madness  are  the  shades  made  subtle.  It  is  a 
very  normal  madness.  Don  Quixote  does  not  differ  much 
from  other  men  in  his  mental  processes.  He  interprets 
the  sights  and  sounds  of  the  actual  world  by  his  past  ex- 
perience; only,  as  he  has  lived  in  the  world  of  books  a 
life  of  imagination,  his  experience  is  unreal,  his  memory 
is  inappUcable  to  the  world  about  him,  or,  as  is  said,  his 
inferences  are  all  wrong.  His  illusions  have  an  origin 
from  without,  and  are  misinterpretations  of  the  external 
world,  due  to  an  expectancy  in  his  own  mind  which  has 
arisen  from  his  absorbed  reading  of  romances.  His  senses 
are  overlaid  with  thought,  and  he  sees  what  he  expects 

[29] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
to  see.  It  is  impossible,  too,  to  acquit  him  of  a  certain 
complicity  with  his  own  madness.  lie  shows  it  when  he 
refrains  from  testing  his  second  helmet;  in  the  fact  that 
he  was  not  fully  persuaded  he  was  a  knight-errant  till 
the  Duke  treated  him  as  such;  and  unmistakably  in  his 
tale  of  what  happened  in  the  Cave  of  Montesinos,  where 
Sancho  frankly  charges  him  with  making  it  up;  at  the 
end,  too,  his  recovery  seems,  in  part  at  least,  self-willed. 
The  history  of  his  madness,  also,  has  a  method  in  it;  in 
the  first  part  he  is  his  own  victim ;  in  the  second  he  is  the 
victim  of  others;  beginning  with  self-deception,  he  ends 
as  the  butt  of  the  deception  of  all  from  Sancho  to  the 
Duke  and  the  Bachelor.  His  madness  is  intermittent;  if 
his  mind  is  in  fact  diseased,  it  is  by  a  capability  of  going 
mad  under  certain  exciting  causes,  but  on  all  other  occa- 
sions he  is  as  remarkable  for  judgment  as  for  learning 
and  eloquence. 

This  strange  madness  of  Don  Quixote  is  comic  in  its 
accidents,  in  its  circumstantial  defeat,  in  its  earthly  en- 
vironment; but  in  itself  it  is  tragic.  Its  seat  is  in  the  very 
excellency  of  the  soul ;  its  illusions  take  body  in  the  no- 
blest human  aims,  the  most  heroic  nature  and  \'irtue  of 
J  the  purest  strain.  A  madman  has  no  character;  but  it  is 
the  character  of  Don  Quixote  that  at  last  draws  the 
knight  out  of  all  his  degradations  and  makes  him  tri- 
umph in  the  heart  of  the  reader.  Modem  dismay  begins 

[30] 


CERVANTES 
in  the  thought  that  here  is  not  the  abnormality  of  an  in- 
dividual but  the  madness  of  the  soul  in  its  own  nature. 
That  high  aims  may  be  ridiculous;  that  heroism  may  be 
folly;  that  virtue  may  be  insanity;  that  the  ideal  which 
was  the  spiritual  wealth  of  the  fathers  may  be  the  farce 
of  the  children ;  that  the  soul  in  its  exaltation,  its  gentle- 
ness and  sacrifice,  has  no  necessary  wisdom  and  in  its 
own  vision  no  warrant  of  reality;  that  the  good  cast 
down,  the  kind  trampled  on,  the  brave  broken,  become 
the  laughter  of  the  world;  these  are  the  truths  which 
make  "  Don  Quixote  "  such  sorry  reading  for  the  ideal- 
ist. He  thought  to  make  the  reality  of  things  curtsey  to 
the  lie  in  his  mind ;  but  that  lie  was  itself  the  substantive 
virtue  of  his  soul.  This  is  the  paradox  of  idealism.  -^' 

Don  Quixote,  so  far  as  the  Knight  of  the  Rueful  Feature 
is  concerned,  would  indeed  be  a  pitiful  farce  to  modern 
feeling,  were  not  his  madness  typical  of  the  partial  san- 
ity of  mankind.  Still  as  in  old  time  a  man  finds  what  he 
goes  out  to  seek;  a  man  sees  his  own  face  in  the  world; 
and  man  is  still  a  victim  of  past  greatness.  These  are  cap- 
ital truths.  Imaginative  illusion,  the  soul's  vice,  is  com- 
mon in  life,  and  affects  most  the  best  of  men,  and  espe- 
cially those  of  great  emotional  capacity,  and  since 
emotional  imagination  is  the  principal  feeder  of  the 
religious  and  moral  energies  of  men,  this  illusion  most 
characterizes  men  of  ideal  temper  possessed  with  the 

[31] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
ideas  of  rescue,  sacrifice  and  battle,  and  arises  most  fre- 
quently in  the  field  of  the  reform  of  the  world.  A  man  of 
one  or  few  ideas  does  not  diflfer  from  Don  Quixote  psy- 
chologically, except  in  degree.  Whether  liis  experience  i.s 
bookish  or  real,  he  confines  his  attention  to  a  specially 
selected  and  usually  narrow  theme,  neglects  the  correc- 
tives that  life  furnishes,  and  becomes  absorbed  in  his 
mastering  preconception  of  life;  he  is  infatuated.  Often 
he  exhibits  a  like  complicity  with  his  own  partial  mad- 
ness, suppresses  irreconcilable  facts,  and  refuses  to 
tliink  in  their  direction.  Often,  too,  he  passes  on  from 
the  stage  of  self-deception,  in  which  he  is  only  his  own 
victim,  and  becomes  the  victim  of  others  practising  on 
him,  whom  they  profess  to  take  at  his  own  estimate,  for 
gain,  convenience,  or  amusement.  The  parallel  is  easily 
followed  out,  and  the  fact  is  recognized  in  the  word 
Quixotic,  which  has  become  a  famiUar  term  in  all  lan- 
guages. Such  Quixotism  is  inherent  in  the  social  ideal, 
especially  as  held  in  youth,  w^hich  ha\ang  necessarily  an 
inaccurate  idea  of  life  indulges  those  hopes  natural  to 
the  human  breast  which  can  have  no  accomplishment  in 
reality;  and  it  is  imbedded  in  inherited  beliefs  and  the 
tradition  of  education,  which  contain  an  element  of  the 
past  inapplicable  to  the  changing  present;  the  outworn 
creed,  the  lost  cause,  all  shells  of  past  faith  and  passion 
are  its  strongholds.  In  this  lies  the  permanent  truth  of 

[32] 


CERVANTES 

the  book  to  life.  Illusion,  and  specifically  the  illusion  of 
the  noble  mind  inheriting  a  great  past,  is  the*  original 
mark  of  Quixotism;  and  the  moral  wliich  men  have 
read  into  it  is,  the  finer  the  soul,  the  more  utter  its  earth- 
ly defeat.  The  hero  from  w  horn  it  took  its  name  marked 
a  great  break  in  the  moral  ideals  of  the  race  as  things  of 
practice ;  and  in  the  futility  of  his  high  behaviour,  reach- 
ing the  height  of  the  ridiculous,  seems  too  clearly  to  ex- 
emplify the  earthly  defeat  of  the  ideal ;  a  defeat  so  abso- 
lute that  the  best  one  can  say  is  —  he  was  wholly  mad. 
The  point  of  view  is  that  of  a  dying  age.  So  Demos- 
thenes felt  on  the  eve  of  the  Hellenizing  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean world,  and  Brutus  on  the  eve  of  its  imperializa- 
tion;  so,  on  the  scale  of  personal  life,  an  old  man  feels. 
"Don  Quixote"  is  an  old  man's  book.  Cervantes  ap- 
phed  a  destructive  criticism  to  the  higher  nature  of  man, 
in  its  aims,  methods,  and  intelligence ;  the  waste  of  noble 
nature,  the  practical  inefficiency  of  virtue  did  not  dis- 
turb him;  sceptical  in  that  he  saw  the  falHbility  of  the 
soul,  as  such,  in  its  own  vision,  and  pessimistic  in  that  he 
recognized  the  impotence  of  the  soul  as  such  in  action, 
he  remains  serene;  the  governing  factor  in  human  fife  is 
its  mortal  condition,  not  its  spiritual  motive,  he  con- 
cludes. Passion,  how  subhme  it  is!  but  oh,  the  irony  of 
it  at  last !  and  no  form  of  it  so  ironical  as  the  passion  for 
reforming  the  world,  the  will  to  serve  mankind! 

[33] 


GREAT  WRITKUS 
Cervantes  is  (Hsilliisioncd;  he  h.'us  afecptcd  the  disillu- 
sionment; he  smiles  at  it.  The  j)eeuliarity  f)f  "  Don  (Quix- 
ote" is  that  all  this  is  set  forth  with  loud  laughter,  with 
frank  and  overflowing  sympathy  with  the  world  as  it  is, 
with  deH<^ht  in  all  its  various  material  Hfe  and  peoj)le. 
It  is  the  world  of  Maritornes,  of  Gines  de  Pasamonte,  of 
Roque  Guinart,  of  the  innkeepers  and  muleteers,  of  the 
graceless  duke  and  his  duchess,  of  real  people;  it  is  not 
Don  Quixote's  world.  It  is  this  acceptance  of  life  as  it  is, 
of  the  lower  element  in  life,  that  is  the  complement  in  the 
book  to  the  denial  of  the  old  ideal.  Here  is  the  victory  of 
realism,  of  the  positive  spirit,  of  the  oncoming  age,  of 
prose  and  sense  and  actuality,  the  modern  time.  Don 
Quixote  closes  a  period,  and  in  all  that  relates  to  him 
there  is  the  pathos  of  death,  the  hopelessness  of  failure, 
the  despair  of  the  end ;  in  all  he  is,  the  eye  is  reverted  to 
the  past  and  sees  its  dissolution,  the  death  of  aristocracy 
in  its  ideal  as  it  was  to  die  in  its  person  on  the  French 
scaffold.  Faith  in  the  ideal  is  dead  in  the  book  to  the  last 
spark.  The  key  of  ideal  faith  had  passed  into  the  hands 
of  the  new  genius  of  the  changing  world,  democracy,  of 
which  Cervantes  knew  nothing;  he  saw  and  helped  to 
mould  the  body  of  the  new  real  world,  but  its  spirit  was 
not  yet  born.  It  is  because  the  ideal  in  "  Don  Quixote  " 
has  no  spiritual  future  that  its  outworn  and  lifeless  forms 
are  such  a  mockery  of  the  soul.  It  brings,  too,  the  immor- 

[34] 


CERVANTES 
tal  doubt.  Will  the  democratic  ideal  in  its  evolution 
prove  as  inapplicable  to  the  enduring  life  of  man  as  have 
the  other  great  historic  ideals  of  the  race  ?  Is  there  noth- 
ing absolute  in  the  soul  ?  Is  "  Don  Quixote "  finally 
greatest  in  its  philosophy,  as  a  book  of  that  relativity 
which  the  modern  spirit  finds  in  all  things  and  most 
dearly  loves  ? 

"  Don  Quixote  "  is  the  book  of  the  one  great  defeat,  but 
also  of  many  victories,  and  especially  those  of  prose,  real- 
ism, and  humour  in  modem  literature.  Of  all  the  victories 
which  it  embodies,  however,  the  greatest  is  that  of  Cer- 
vantes over  himself.  The  unfailing  cheerfulness  of  its 
spirit  is  the  temperament  of  Cervantes  playing  through 
it.  He  had  lived  and  toiled,  he  had  felt  the  full  passion  of 
life,  he  had  dreamed  and  planned  and  striven,  both  as 
man  and  writer,  in  arms  and  letters,  and  he  had  met  for 
the  most  part  only  the  blows  of  fortune;  wounds  and 
slavery,  neglect  and  poverty,  the  well-known  wages  of 
genius,  had  been  paid  him  in  full  measure.  Yet  every  in- 
dication of  liis  personality  that  survives  shows  him  un- 
spoiled and  still  companionable,  pleasant,  patient.  It 
was  in  tliis  spirit  that,  being  about  to  die,  he  bade  fare- 
well to  all.  Scott  at  the  end  of  his  days,  with  Wordsworth 
and  others  about  him  in  the  library  at  Abbotsford,  asked 
Locldiart  to  read  the  scene.  Allan,  the  painter,  "  remem- 
bered nothing  he  ever  saw  with  such  sad  pleasure  as  the 

[35] 


CHEAT  WRITERS 
altiludes  of  Scott  and  Wordsworth  as  the  story  went  on." 
It  was  a  scene  that  recalls  that  other  death  of  Tennyson, 
lying  with  his  open  Shakspere  in  the  moonlight.  "  Good- 
bye, humours;  good-bye,  pleasant  fancies;  good-bye, 
merry  friends,  for  I  perceive  I  am  dying,  in  the  wish  to 
see  you  happy  in  the  other  life."  These  were  Cervantes's 
last  words  in  his  world.  The  most  profound  master  of 
the  irony  of  life  preserved  his  heart  uncorroded  by  that 
knowledge,  as  he  had  kept  it  sweet  against  the  enmity  of 
man  and  fortune. 


[36] 


Great  Writers 
n 


SCOTT 


Sir  Walter  Scott,  the  prince  of  prose  romancers,  should 
be  reckoned  among  the  great  benefactors  of  mankind. 
Of  the  works  of  prose  in  the  nineteenth  century,  which 
have  contributed  to  human  happiness  on  the  universal 
scale,  the  Waverley  Novels  hold  a  place  by  virtue  of  their 
millions  of  readers;  and  now,  coming  into  the  hands  of 
the  fourth  generation,  they  are  still  one  of  the  principal 
effective  contemporary  possessions  of  the  English  race 
in  literature.  Criticism,  which  sooner  or  later,  assails  all 
works  of  great  fame,  has  the  most  trifling  effect  upon 
them;  they  are  inrulnerable  in  the  hearts  of  the  people. 
They  contain  so  much  humanity  in  its  plain  style;  they 
disclose  such  romantic  scenes,  such  stir  of  gallantry, 
such  a  high  behaviour,  in  connection  with  events  and 
personages  otherwise  memorable;  and  they  are,  besides, 
so  coloured  with  the  hues  of  the  mind  arising  from  local 
association,  imaginative  legend,  historic  glamour  and 

[39] 


(iUEAT  \vriti<:hs 

tlic  sense  of  the  presence  of  fine  action,  that  their  recep- 
tion by  the  heart  is  spontaneous.  Especially,  they  con- 
tiiiii  Scotland  as  Don  Quixote  contains  Spain,  only  upon 
a  broader  and  raore  diversified  scale.  Cervantes,  in- 
deed, comes  into  one's  mind  in  connection  with  Scott  in 
many  ways. 

Scott's  descent  was  like  that  of  Cervantes.  He  was  of 
the  old  blood,  but  bom  in  a  modest  station.  If  the 
changes  of  time  had  not  reduced  liis  family  stock  to  the 
condition  of  the  poor  hidalgo,  they  had  much  tempered 
its  original  border  strain.  Scott  was  as  much  attached  to 
his  ancestors  as  a  New  Englander,  and  was  continually 
harking  back  in  his  anecdotes  —  and  he  had  a  full  rep- 
ertory of  such  tales  of  the  house  —  to  "  Auld  Watt "  of 
Harden  and  "Beardie"  of  Teviotdale,  while  through 
these  worthies  and  otherwise  he  could  trace  the  affluents 
of  liis  blood  to  the  great  Scotch  houses,  among  which  he 
took  particular  pride  in  Buccleugh.  His  father  was  a 
simple  lawyer,  whose  portrait  is  exactly  drawn  in  Saun- 
ders Fairford,  in  "  Redgauntlet,"  a  plain  citizen,  shrewd, 
formal,  practical,  well  exempUfpng  the  fixed  type  of  the 
profession  at  Edinburgh.  Perhaps  the  hterary  strain, 
Avliich  docs  not  appear  in  the  paternal  ancestr}',  came 
from  the  mother,  the  daughter  of  an  eminent  physician, 
Dr.  Rutherford,  and  herself  well-educated;  certainly, 
although  Scott  had  several  brothers  and  a  sister,  the 

[40] 


SCOTT 
genius  of  the  family  was  wholly  allotted  to  him.  Owing 
to  a  lameness,  which  developed  in  his  right  leg  in  child- 
hood and  was  an  impediment  to  him  throughout  life, 
the  boy  was  in  early  years  country-bred  and  much  en- 
couraged in  physical  exertion,  for  which  indeed  he  had 
a  natural  inclination,  being  full  of  animal  vigour  and 
spirits.  He  said  late  in  life  —  "  from  cliildhood's  earliest 
hour  I  have  rebelled  against  external  circumstances;" 
and  in  combatting  this  physical  disadvantage  he  first 
exercised  his  courage  and  pertinacity.  His  deficiency  did 
not  interfere  with  his  good  comradery  as  a  school-boy. 
He  walked  and  rode  a  good  deal,  and  he  bore  perhaps 
more  than  his  share  in  the  rough  fighting  of  the  schools 
and  the  town  then  in  vogue.  As  he  passed  from  master  to 
master,  each  of  them  characteristic  examples  of  the  old 
discipline,  he  did  his  tasks  and  won  their  interest  and 
favour,  but  it  was  rather  by  his  sympathetic  under- 
standing of  Hterature  than  by  any  brilliancy  of  mind. 
He  had  the  education  of  the  schools  as  a  thing  of  course, 
and  it  was  valuable  to  liim;  but  he  illustrates  the  fact 
that  to  turn  a  boy  loose  in  a  Ubrary  is  to  give  him  the 
best  of  all  opportunities — the  opportunity  for  self-edu- 
cation. He  read  from  childhood  widely  and  well,  and 
while  yet  a  boy  had  such  an  acquaintance  with  great 
Hterature  as  would  now  seem  phenomenal,  though  it  was 
precisely  the  same  as  that  which  a  generation  later  New 

[41] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
England  boys  had  at  the  same  age,  if  they  were  so  in- 
clined. More  than  in  his  childish  verses  or  the  tales  com- 
posed with  his  schoolmates  there  is  the  feeling  of  in- 
stinct in  Ballantync's  school  anecdote :  "  Come,  slink 
over  beside  me,  Jamie,  and  F  11  tell  you  a  stor}'.  "  Plainly 
in  liis  boyhood  Scott  was  as  full  of  literature  as  he  was  of 
fight.  If  one  could  have  discerned  it,  however,  the  true 
sign  of  the  future  was  not  in  the  literary  tastes  which 
Scott  shared  with  others  of  liis  kind,  but  in  the  historic 
sense  which  he  possessed  in  a  pecuhar  degree.  He  was 
from  the  start  deeply  interested  in  his  own  country  and 
his  own  people;  he  was  an  insatiable  listener  to  the 
tales  of  "  Sixty  years  since  "  and  their  hke,  to  the  border 
ballads,  the  legends,  all  the  romantic  growths  of  the 
Scotch  memory;  he  had  the  zeal  of  an  antiquary  in  see- 
ing the  places  where  events  had  happened,  the  old 
fields  of  battle,  the  ruined  castle,  the  border-wall,  or 
whatever  spot  or  object  liistor}'  had  left  its  mark  upon. 
Tliis  was  the  gift  that,  hke  Aaron's  rod,  was  to  swallow 
up  all  the  others. 

It  is  impossible  to  trace  in  Scott,  in  early  life,  any  of 
the  self-consciousness  that  is  apt  to  accompany  such 
precocity  and  intensity,  any  sense  of  a  call  from  the  fu- 
ture. His  father  tolerated  and  indulged  these  tastes,  but 
to  his  practical  mind  a  literary  career  for  his  son  would 
hardly  have  occurred.  The  youth  was  docile,  was  ap- 

[42] 


SCOTT 
prenticed  in  his  father's  office,  and  at  twenty-one  was 
called  to  the  bar.  Meanwhile  he  maintained  his  literary- 
pursuits  as  a  matter  of  course.  Intellectual  interest  at 
that  time  was  still  a  part  of  men's  life,  and  in  the  clubs 
of  good  fellowship,  where  Scott  delighted  to  make  one 
and  was  often  a  leading  spirit,  literature  had  its  share 
with  other  topics.  Thus  it  happened  that  he  was  among 
the  first  of  his  contemporaries  to  feel  the  attraction  of 
German  Hterature,  then  reacliing  England,  and  to  ac- 
quire some  knowledge  of  it ;  the  kinsliip  of  its  ballad  and 
romance  with  the  spirit  of  the  border,  wliich  was  already 
growing  incarnate  in  Scott,  prepared  a  ready  welcome 
for  it  in  his  sympathies.  Nothing  is  more  remarkable  in 
Scott's  life  than  its  entire  naturalness.  He  never  made 
an  effort,  hardly  a  choice;  he  merely  did  the  next  thing; 
so  now  he  did  not  think  of  adopting  literature  as  a  ca- 
reer, but  it  was  natural  for  him  to  try  his  hand  at  a  trans- 
lation. Life  went  on  as  naturally,  too,  in  other  ways. 
The  course  of  true  love  not  running  smooth,  he  was  left 
with  a  memory  of  early  devotion  which  diffused  a  pa- 
thetic tenderness  over  his  recollections  of  youth;  and  in 
the  lapse  of  time  —  not  too  long  a  lapse  —  he  married 
happily  an  English-bred  lady  of  French  birth,  being 
speedy  in  both  the  wooing  and  the  wedding.  In  his  cot- 
tage at  Lasswade  and  afterwards  on  the  little  estate  of 
Ashestiel  he  had  a  characteristic  home,  filled  with  his  per- 

[43] 


GREAT  WRITERS 

sonality,  and  in  both  he  showed  that  passion  for  making 
the  place  his  own  which  was  later disphiyed  on  the  grand 
scale  at  Abbotsford.  He  made  no  great  progress  at  the 
bar,  and  as  time  went  on  he  habitually  ascribed  something 
of  this  slowness  to  the  unfavoural)le  efTect  of  his  literary 
avocations  on  his  professional  reputation.  Tenacity,  how- 
ever, was  characteristic  of  him.  lie  never  let  go  of  any- 
thing while  it  would  hold.  He  knew  the  ways  of  his  world, 
too,  and  was  not  averse  to  them ;  and  in  this  case  wisdom 
was  justified  of  her  child.  At  twenty-eight  he  was  made 
sheriff  of  Selkirkshire,  and  five  years  later  obtained  the 
additional  post  of  clerk  to  the  Court  of  Session;  and 
although  he  did  not  at  once  come  into  the  emoluments  of 
the  latter,  the  two  places  secured  him  for  life  an  ample 
independence  and  honourable  station.  His  position  in 
the  working  world  was  that  of  a  gentleman  of  the  law 
with  clerical  and  executive  duties. 

It  may  be  that  this  security  of  tenure  as  a  practical 
man  contributed  something  to  Scott's  attitude  toward 
the  profession  of  literature  —  a  view  exceptional  among 
authors  —  as  a  mode  of  life  like  any  other,  and  conse- 
quently to  his  remarkable  freedom  from  literary  vanity. 
He  was  always  a  man  of  many  affairs,  of  which  literature 
was  only  one;  and  it  took  its  place  as  a  normal  part  of 
life.  It  is  likely,  however,  that  the  slowness  of  his  devel- 
opment as  an  author  was  the  fundamental  cause  of  his 

[44] 


SCOTT 
taking  so  sober  a  view.  His  precocity  never  took  the 
form  of  immature  publication.  In  the  case  of  no  genius 
is  the  gradual  hiving  of  the  material  on  which  it  was  to 
work  so  marked,  the  unhurried  ripening  of  faculty  so 
like  a  process  of  nature ;  and  Scott  seems  all  the  time  as 
ignorant  of  what  was  to  be  the  outcome  as  the  seed  and 
blade  are  of  the  full  com  in  the  ear.  He  was  an  out-of- 
doors  man  as  he  had  been  a  tramping  boy.  It  is  impos- 
sible to  think  of  him  without  his  horses  and  dogs.  His 
duties  as  sheriff  took  him  across  country  continually, 
and  he  always  had  more  months  out  of  Edinburgh  than 
in  it  notwithstanding  his  clerkship.  He  was  thus  in  con- 
stant contact  with  Scotch  life  and  country,  and  he  never 
lost  or  relaxed  his  first  impulse,  to  know  and  see  with  his 
eyes,  so  far  as  his  eyes  could  see  it,  all  the  local  history. 
He  was  also  in  love  with  the  genius  of  Scotland  as  it  was 
stamped  in  the  people  of  all  sorts  and  conditions.  Hu- 
man nature,  the  rough  hard  article  free  from  its  alloy  of 
the  town,  was  treasure-trove  to  him.  On  those  annual 
"  raids  into  Liddesdale, "  and  on  many  another  journey, 
he  made  himseK  master  of  this  book  of  truth  out  of  which 
came  so  much  of  the  character,  anecdote  and  phrase 
that  are  most  sterling,  real  and  humoursome  in  his  books. 
For  all  such  actuality  in  the  country-side  he  had  the  same 
tenacity  of  mind  that  Lincoln  showed  in  his  circuit- 
riding,  and  he  was  as  full  of  genuine  telling  anecdote 

[45] 


CRKAT  WRITERS 
patlicTcd  from  the  liviii';  lip.  Tic  was,  too,  most  compan- 
ionable; "he  met  every  man,"  it  was  said,  "like  liis 
blood  relation."  In  these  "raids"  and  journeys  there 
was  much  roughness,  but  it  was  welcome  to  him  as 
having  some  taste  of  the  old  border  life.  The  country 
people  were  fond  of  him;  to  them  he  was  to  the  end  of  his 
days  "  the  Sheriff. "  In  Edinburgh,  also,  he  held  a  vig- 
orous and  social  life  with  men.  In  the  times  of  the  fear  of 
Napoleonic  invasion,  he  had  been  a  Hve  patriot  and 
cavalryman,  quartermaster  of  the  Light  Horse,  and 
took  his  share  of  camp  and  drill  with  great  zest,  while 
still  in  the  late  twenties  of  life;  and  he  was  always  a  fear- 
less horseman,  preferring  the  turbulent  ford  to  the  safe 
passage  and  never  "going  round"  for  anything  in  the 
way.  If  he  "  broke  the  neck  of  the  day's  work  "  before 
breakfast,  as  was  his  lifelong  habit,  it  was  a  matter  of 
necessity;  for  a  man  who  spent  the  greater  part  of  the 
day  in  physical  activity  and  exercise  could  have  a  fresh 
mind  only  in  the  morning.  It  was  in  those  early  hours 
that  he  accomplished  his  literary  work ;  and  if  there  was 
much  mechanical  routine  in  the  practice,  perhaps  liis 
youthful  experience  as  a  writer  of  legal  foolscap  had 
accustomed  him  to  the  drudgery  of  the  desk.  In  a  life 
of  such  variety  and  scope,  so  full  of  work  of  all  kinds, 
with  many  active  interests,  overflowing  too  with  hos- 
pitality and  rich  in  friendships,  genius  less  abundant 

[  -io  ] 


SCOTT 
and    powerful    than   Scott's   would   have    been  over- 
whelmed, but  he  had  the  knack  to  turn  it  all  jnto  new 
resources. 

Until  Scott  was  past  thirty  he  may  well  have  thought 
of  literature  as  only  the  busiest  and  most  delightful  part 
of  his  leisure,  and  have  seemed  to  himself  as  to  others 
the  son  of  the  old  lawyer  treading  in  his  father's  foot- 
steps to  a  like  mediocre  fortune.  He  was  of  a  more  gen- 
erous make,  it  is  true;  he  was  not  at  all  a  precisian; 
there  was  much  freedom  for  human  nature  in  Edin- 
burgh life,  and  he  took  his  share;  in  the  careless  cheer 
of  his  youthful  days  and  in  the  hearty  sociability  of  his 
manhood  there  was  something  that  would  now  be 
thought  boisterous ;  boy  and  man,  conviviality  was  warm 
in  liis  blood.  He  was  one  of  those  men  who  diffuse  a 
physical  glow  about  them.  But  also,  it  is  plain,  there 
was  something  in  him  that  set  liim  distinctly  apart;  the 
unlikeness  which  isolates  genius,  felt  before  it  is  recog- 
nized, like  the  electric  air  of  the  undischarged  cloud;  in 
every  company,  however  varied,  though  never  too  much 
the  leader,  he  was  the  interesting  man.  There  was  a  glow 
in  his  mind  as  well  as  in  his  blood.  It  was  not  literary 
ambition  exactly;  though  he  says  that  when  he  wrote 
the  song  of  Young  Lochinvar  he  was  "  passionately  am- 
bitious of  fame, "  it  was  more  the  flash  of  a  young  man's 
feeling  than  the  awakening  of  resolute  ambition.  Though 

[47] 


CHEAT  VVRITKI{S 

so  widely  and  well  read  in  literature  and  with  a  real 
bookishness  in  his  tastes,  his  genius  was  not  at  all  book- 
ish. The  glow  in  his  mind  was  vital,  and  nourished  on 
life,  and  it  flowed  almost  entirely  from  that  historic  sense, 
that  absorbed  interest  in  liis  own  countr}'  and  people, 
which  was  the  master-light  in  which  he  saw  life.  He  at- 
tracted all  Scottishness  to  liimself  as  by  the  necessity  of  a 
fairy  gift.  If  any  delver  in  the  old  literature  was  in  the 
neighbourhood,  such  as  the  marvellous  Leyden,  he  was 
close  in  his  company;  if  there  was  a  kindred  scholar 
across  the  border,  hke  ElUs,  he  was  in  correspondence 
with  him;  and  with  such  men  he  began  that  growing 
circle  of  friendships  by  letter,  re-enforced  with  occas- 
ional visits,  which  is  one  of  the  most  agreeable  and  pe- 
cuUar  pleasures  of  the  literary  life  and  in  Scott's  case 
was  so  large  and  interesting  a  part  of  his  biography.  He 
had,  for  the  time,  concentrated  his  antiquarian  interest 
in  the  endeavour  to  collect  and  edit  the  ballads  wliich  he 
finally  issued  as  the  "  IVIinstrelsy  of  the  Scottish  Border," 
and  in  particular  attention  to  old  metrical  romances. 
This  work  was  really  a  stage  in  his  preparation  to  write, 
a  stone  that  marks  his  progress  in  that  absorption  of 
Scotland  into  liis  own  genius  which  he  was  unconscious- 
ly accomplishing  without  a  thought  of  its  ulterior  end. 
He  was  so  far,  in  the  line  of  his  true  development,  only  a 
Utcrary  antiquary. 

[48] 


SCOTT 

The  beginnings  of  his  literary  career,  wliich  ante- 
dated the  "Minstrelsy,"  did  not  grow  out  of  his  true 
material,  but  in  a  curiously  opposite  way  were  distinctly 
bookish.  His  faculty  of  imagination  was  stirred  inde- 
pendently and  apart  from  the  subjects  it  was  to  operate 
upon  habitually.  He  made  some  translations  from  the 
German  ballads,  and  also  a  version  of  Goethe's  "  Goetz 
von  BerKchingen ; "  and  in  connection  with  these  studies 
he  tried  some  original  ballads  of  his  own.  He  was  then 
twenty -eight  years  old  and  he  describes  these  as  his  first 
"  serious  attempts  at  verse.  "  Two  years  later  when  he 
published  the  early  volumes  of  the  "  Minstrelsy,"  the  idea 
that  he  might  make  hterature  an  important  part  of  liis 
life  seems  to  have  been  distinctly  formed,  and  it  had 
found  its  true  roots.  The  close  tie,  the  natural  birth  in- 
deed, of  his  first  poem,  "  The  Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel, " 
out  of  the  deepest  prepossession  of  liis  mind,  is  obvious. 
He  wrote  it,  perhaps,  with  as  little  seK-confidence  as  ever 
any  distinguished  poet  felt  in  composing  liis  first  work, 
and  was  as  much  surprised  by  its  reception  as  the  world 
was  at  its  appearance.  He  won  at  once  a  popular  crown 
which  no  hand  feebler  than  Byron's  was  to  wrest  from 
him.  He  had  then  already  reached  liis  thirty-fourth  year. 
"Marmion,"  and  "The  Lady  of  the  Lake,"  which 
quickly  followed,  confirmed  his  poetic  fame;  on  these 
three  tales  in  verse,  together  with  a  score  of  lyrics,  his 

[49] 


GREAT  WHITEUS 
jM'iiiiancnt   vogue  jus  what  he  niiglit   have  called   "a 
rhymer"  rests. 

The  merit  of  Scott's  poetry  has  been  much  attacked 
by  latter-day  critics;  but  there  is  a  reasonable  view  to  l)e 
taken  of  it,  and  witliin  it.s  limitations  its  worth  is  still  un- 
impaired. Its  survival,  notwithstanding  the  immensely 
greater  work  of  the  poets  who  followed  him  —  men  who 
were  purely  poets  —  shows  life  at  the  root.  It  had  origin- 
ality, and  retains  its  force.  Scott  broke  new  ground ;  he 
discovered  material  which  had  natural  poetry,  and  he 
treated  it  in  a  novel  manner,  appropriate  to  the  subject 
and  stimulating  to  the  mind.  If  he  borrowed  his  metre 
from  Coleridge,  he  applied  it  in  a  manner  and  on  a  scale 
that  Coleridge  was  incapable  of.  He  was  an  experimen- 
ter in  a  new  kind,  and  in  it  was  wholly  self-educated; 
such  real  defects  as  there  are  in  the  verse  are  incidental 
to  its  being  tentative  w'ork.  There  is  more  power  than 
craft,  more  hfe  than  skill;  he  succeeds  by  spontaneity 
more  than  by  art.  The  careless  cross-country  gallop  of 
the  metre  is  in  keeping  with  the  verve  and  unevenness 
which  characterize  the  whole;  but  the  blood  is  kept 
awake.  His  great  power  of  narrative  tells  the  tale,  but  the 
interest  is  less  in  the  individuals  than  in  the  kind  of  hfe 
depicted,  the  baronial  hall,  the  border  battle,  the  High- 
land romance;  he  revivified  the  times  he  treated  in  en- 
during colours,  wliicli  replace  histor}'  in  the  mcmorj'  for 

[50] 


SCOTT 
his  district  equally  with  Shakspere's  plays  for  the  king- 
dom. He  gave  especially  to  the  Highlands  an  imagina- 
tive memory  which  annexed  them  to  the  lands  which 
have  a  meaning  to  the  general  heart  of  man;  he  alone 
gave  that  charm  to  Loch  Katrine  and  its  environs 
which  lifts  the  scene  above  the  savagery  of  nature.  It  is 
not  due  only  to  his  description,  but  he  placed  action 
there.  It  is  an  error  to  tliink  of  nature-poetry  as  lying  in 
the  sphere  of  contemplation,  merely  because  that  was 
Wordsworth's  way ;  out-of-doors  poetry,  such  as  Byron's 
tales,  often  contains  more  of  nature  in  the  mingling  of 
the  great  scene  with  the  action  than  any  number  of  ad- 
dresses to  flowers  of  the  wayside  and  lonely  weeds  on  the 
rocks.  In  Scott,  fair  as  the  landscape  is,  nature  is  more 
than  landscape;  it  is  the  place  of  the  action,  the  breath- 
ing air  of  life  itself.  The  action,  moreover,  which  is  the 
main  interest,  is  unsurpassed  in  the  quality  of  gallantry, 
in  the  stirring  moment  and  the  personal  adventure.  He 
is  the  most  martial  of  English  poets;  excepting  a  half- 
dozen  lyrics  and  ballads  by  Campbell,  and  one  or  two 
others,  there  is  nothing  in  our  poetry  to  rival  him  in  this 
respect.  This  is  the  Homeric  fighting  quality  that  some 
find  in  his  verse,  and  there  is  truth  in  the  remark.  It  is 
said  that  he  "pleases  boys;"  that  is  not  against  him. 
The  obviousness  of  his  meaning,  the  fact  that  his  ideas, 
images  and  language  arc  within  easy  reach  of  the  aver- 

[51] 


GRKAT  WRITERS 
a^c  mind,  the  presence  of  much  ordinariness  in  the  sub- 
stance, as  they  partly  account  for  his  ready  popularity 
and  its  wide  spread,  also  denote  his  permanent  appeal; 
for  with  all  this,  wliich  is  called  his  commonness,  there 
goes  that  most  uncommon  power  to  stir  the  blood,  to 
send  the  soul  out  of  doors,  to  revivify  lost  romantic 
modes  of  life  in  all  their  picturesque  colour,  their  daring 
spirit,  their  emotional  reality.  He  makes  his  reader  live 
the  life,  and  it  is  not  only  the  life  of  a  past  age  but  it  is 
one  of  the  great  permanent  types  of  life.  It  appeals  to  all 
freemen;  the  echo  of  it,  the  desire  for  it,  are  in  their 
blood.  I  have  referred  to  the  sneer  that  Scott  "  pleases 
boys.  "  He  does.  It  was  "  many  and  many  a  year  ago,  in 
a  kingdom  by  the  sea, "  that  my  own  fourteenth  summer 
was  made  happy  with  this  delight.  I  remember  that  I 
read  every  line  of  his  verse  with  eagerness  and  poured 
out  my  admiration  in  a  longer  essay  than  this  is  likely  to 
prove.  The  experience  was  not  a  bad  one  for  a  boy  who, 
at  the  yet  more  tender  age  of  twelve  had  been  deep 
in  Byron  and  melancholy.  It  is  thirty  years  and  more 
since  then;  but  to  this  day  the  clang  of  the  verse  of 
Branksome  Hall  turns  all  the  iron  of  my  blood  to 
music,  and  the  sight  of  the  falling  standard  on 
Flodden  Field  is  the  most  I  shall  ever  know  of  the 
heart  of  Sidney  "  moved  more  than  with  a  trumpet. " 
Tliis  is  the  sort  of  mastery  in  which  Scott  is  great, 

[52] 


SCOTT 
for  both  boy  and  man.  The  personal  reminiscence 
only  gives  emphasis  to  what  is  broadly  true.  *Poetry,  in 
the  mould  which  Scott  commanded,  could  not  give  ex- 
pression to  his  whole  genius;  it  is  not  in  verse  that  he 
did  his  great  work;  but  he  had  set  the  fashion  and 
showed  the  way  for  Byron  —  in  itself  surely  no  small 
thing  —  and  when  Byron  "  beat "  him,  as  he  said,  he 
turned  to  prose  fiction  and  came  into  his  own.  It  is  not 
the  least  of  his  honours  as  a  man  that  after  Byron  had 
surpassed  him,  and  in  fact  dethroned  him  in  the  popular 
breath,  Scott  made  and  kept  his  friendship  and,  notwith- 
standing their  profound  difference  in  character,  defended 
his  name  and  fame  against  the  bitter  storm  of  English  en- 
mity. He  did  not,  however,  give  up  the  tale  in  verse  at 
once,  just  as  he  had  not  given  up  the  law.  It  was  not  in 
his  nature,  as  has  been  said,  to  let  go.  He  continued  to 
write  metrical  romances,  but  none  of  them  have  the  same 
boldness  of  execution  or  the  same  cling  to  the  mind  that 
belonged  to  the  earlier  efforts.  In  these  poetic  years,  too, 
he  had  done  what  in  any  other  man  would  in  itself 
have  seemed  abundant  labour,  in  massive  editorial 
work  and  other  miscellaneous  literary  ways.  His  poems 
represent,  after  all,  but  a  fragment  of  his  immense  energy; 
and  now,  feeling  the  need  of  appealing  to  the  public  in  a 
new  line,  he  solved  the  situation  by  taking  up  a  new 
and  unfinished  task. 

[53] 


GREAT  \VHITE1{S 
The  entrance  of  Scott  on  the  field  of  prose  fiction 
hears  a  close  resemblance  to  his  debut  in  [)oetry.  It  has 
the  same  tentativeness,  the  character  of  an  experiment, 
lie  had  long  had  in  mind  an  attempt  to  depict  the  man- 
ners of  his  country  in  prose.  He  had  read  Miss  Edge- 
worth's  Irish  tales,  and  he  thought  something  like  that 
could  be  done  for  Scotland.  He  had  for  some  years  been 
privately  interested  with  Ballantyne  in  the  printing  busi- 
ness ;  and  the  fact  had  turned  his  mind  to  the  problems 
of  publishing  and  kept  him  keenly  alive  to  the  opportu- 
nities of  trade,  as  if  he  had  been  —  as  essentially  he  was 
—  a  publisher's  adviser.  He  was  always  interested  in 
"  bringing  out "  something,  and  the  usefulness  of  his  own 
faculties  in  feeding  the  press  was  a  constant  element  in 
the  business.  Like  Cervantes,  again,  he  tried  all  kinds; 
but  his  first  experiment  in  fiction  had  not  seemed  prom- 
ising. He  began  "  Waverley  "  in  1805,  just  after  the  pub- 
lication of  the  "  Lay  of  the  Last  IMinstrel ; "  he  resumed 
it  five  years  later  and  was  again  discouraged ;  after  an- 
other interval,  finding  the  manuscript  while  he  was 
hunting  for  fishing  tackle,  he  wrote  the  last  two  volumes 
in  three  weeks,  in  1813,  and  it  was  published  anony- 
mously early  the  next  year.  Its  success,  which  is  one  of 
the  legends  of  literature,  was  as  far  beyond  expectation 
as  that  of  '^The  Lay"  had  been  in  its  time;  and  he  fol- 
lowed it  up,  just  as  he  had  done  in  poetry,  with  that 


SCOTT 
rapid  succession  of  triumph  after  triumph  which  made 
him  in  the  end  one  of  the  leading  figures  of  contem- 
porary Europe  and  the  national  glory  of  liis  own  country. 
The  "Author  of  Waverley  "  was  forty-three  years  old 
when  he  began  the  great  series ;  but  though  the  discovery 
and  application  of  his  powers  have  the  semblance  of  ac- 
cident, both  his  success  and  his  fertility  were  the  direct 
result  of  slowly  maturing  causes.  That  long  hiving  of 
material  and  ripening  of  faculty  had  gone  on  without 
any  consciousness  of  the  end  to  which  they  were  to  be 
applied;  but  the  preparation  was  complete,  and  Scott 
had  now  found  the  work  —  a  necessity  of  genius  —  into 
which  he  could  put  the  whole  of  himself.  His  primary 
endowment  was  the  historic  sense,  in  which  he  excelled 
all  other  English  imaginative  writers,  and  in  him  it  was 
bred  of  such  love  of  country  as  to  be  an  impelling  pas- 
sion of  patriotism.  His  love  of  Scotland  was  as  close  to 
him  as  his  family  pride,  and  his  life  was  a  thing  of  di- 
rect contact  with  what  he  loved.  His  tenacity,  remarkable 
in  all  its  manifestations,  became  genius  when  applied  to 
anything  Scottish.  He  had  an  ocular  memory  of  the 
places  he  had  seen;  probably  there  is  no  local  spot  de- 
scribed in  his  Scotch  novels  that  is  not  a  direct  tranjs- 
cript  from  nature;  and  the  native  landscape  had  so  filled 
his  mind  that,  at  the  end,  in  the  soft  environs  of  Naples 
he  could  see  only  Scotland ;  "  on  proceeding, "  says  his 

[55] 


GREAT  VVHITEHS 
companion  there,  remarking  on  this,  "  he  repeated  in  a 
grave  tone  and  with  great  emphasis: 

"Up  the  craggij  mountain,  and  down  the  mossy  glen 
We  canna  gang  a-millcing ,  for  Charlie  and  his  men.** 

There  was  the  same  prepossession  of  his  mind  with  the 
historical  and  Uving  characters  of  the  land,  its  feuds  and 
legends,  its  past  and  present.  In  truth,  in  these  years  of 
unconscious  preparation  he  was  not  unlike  Don  Quixote 
reading  the  romances  of  chivalry;  his  mind  was  charged 
with  Scotland,  and  when  he  went  forth  into  the  world  as 
a  novelist  spent  itself  in  the  things  of  fiction,  in  a 
Quixotic  enthusiasm.  He  lived  much  of  the  time  in  an 
imaginary  w^orld,  as  he  said,  not  only  when  he  was  ac- 
tually composing  but  in  his  mood  of  mind;  it  had  been 
so  from  childhood;  he  had  partly  realized  this  world  in 
poetry,  he  completely  embodied  it  in  prose.  His  active 
professional  duties,  wliich  were  of  a  routine  nature,  and 
his  out-of-doors  life  with  men  and  practical  affairs  were, 
no  doubt,  a  means  of  keeping  the  balance  of  sanity,  of 
actuality,  in  his  Ufe;  but,  for  all  that,  he  had  built  up  a 
world  of  his  own  in  wliicli  his  mind  lived.  It  was  this 
world  wliich  came  to  birth  in  the  Waverley  Novels,  pri- 
marily in  the  Scotch  tales,  which  are  the  core  of  the  se- 
ries, and  secondarily  in  the  foreign  tales,  including  the 
English,  which  often  have  large  Scotch  elements  and  are 

[56] 


SCOTT 
all  created  on  the  same  ground  principles.  As  on  the  ideal 
side,  like  Don  Quixote,  his  mind  was  imbued  with  a 
past  age  that  gave  its  colours  to  his  waking  hfe,  so  too  on 
the  side  of  actuaUty,  like  the  Knight  of  La  Mancha's 
author,  he  had  gone  up  and  down  in  the  land  and  knew 
all  its  people,  high  and  low,  noble  and  peasant  and  cate- 
ran,  its  professions  and  trades,  its  servants,  its  castaways 
and  poor  scholars,  the  whole  range  of  its  human  types ; 
for  the  ideal  and  the  actual,  and  they  were  homogeneous 
and  not  opposed  in  his  case,  he  was  equally  well  fur- 
nished ;  his  representation  of  Scotland  would  be  as  com- 
plete as  Cervantes  had  made  of  Spain,  and  vaster. 

The  oneness  of  his  genius — the  fact  that  the  same  pow- 
er is  here  at  work  that  produced  the  poems  —  is  shown 
by  the  identical  way  in  which  he  approached  his  task. 
The  defects  of  "  Waverley,"  as  an  experimental  trial, 
are  the  same  as  those  of  "  The  Lay ; "  "  The  Antiquary  " 
is  better  made  in  the  same  way  as  "  Marmion. "  He 
owed  httle,  if  anything,  to  example  in  either  case ;  he  was 
self  educated  both  as  poet  and  noveUst.  The  virtues  of 
mere  craft  do  not  count  for  much  in  his  success  in  prose 
any  more  than  in  verse.  Construction  is  loose,  compo- 
sition is  rapid  and  careless;  art  is  secondary  to  matter. 
Sheer  power  of  genius,  however,  is  there  with  its  inevit- 
able and  brilliant  mastery  of  the  situation.  It  takes  the 
same  direction  as  in  the  poems ;  the  novelist  does  not  aim 

[57] 


GREAT  WRITERS 

at  a  talc  of  inclividiial  fortunes,  l)ut  lie  onflcavoiirs  to  rep- 
resent a  kind  of  life.  It  is  this  that  f^ivcs  him  breadth  of 
meaning.  It  is  social  not  private  life  that  he  sets  forth. 
In  a  novel  there  may  be  many  elements  —  the  plot,  the 
hero,  situation,  dialogue,  tableau,  atmosphere  and  the 
like;  and  these  may  be  subordinated  or  emphasized 
separately  in  infinite  combinations.  The  faults  which 
criticism  charges  to  Scott's  form  largely  proceed  from  a 
too  limited  and  rigid  conception,  from  the  point  of  view 
of  construction,  of  what  narrative  art  consists  in.  In  fact 
his  novel  bears,  in  its  relation  to  the  more  unified  type, 
some  resemblance  to  the  chronicle  play  in  its  relation  to 
the  more  organized  drama.  He  seeks,  under  the  impulse 
of  liis  historic  sense,  a  broader  effect  than  any  tale  of  in- 
dividual life  can  give  —  a  social  effect.  He  is  apt  to  set 
liis  particular  story  in  a  stream  of  general  events,  to 
which  the  fortunes  of  the  indi^^duals  are  related,  but  the 
interest  is  less  in  the  plot  than  in  the  stream  of  events. 
He  thus  gives  a  truer  perspective  to  life  and  greater  sig- 
nificance to  his  matter.  The  control  of  the  plot,  and  its 
issues,  are  apt  to  lie  at  a  distance,  in  what  may  be  called 
a  kind  of  machination  in  the  background,  as  the  affair  of 
the  house  of  Osbaldiston  in  "  Rob  Roy, "  or  old  Elspeth's 
secret  in  "The  Antiquary."  The  encompassing  of  a 
larger  world  is  round  about  the  stor}'.  Like  all  the  great- 
est writers,  Scott  gives  the  great  scene  of  Ufe  always ;  it 

[58] 


SCOTT 
is  a  crowded  stage,  a  world  full  of  people.  In  such  a  scene 
the  hero  may  occupy  an  unimportant  place ;  thcinterest  is 
not  primarily  in  him.  It  is  a  feudal,  commercial,  pohtical 
world,  filled  with  fixed  types;  there  is  an  abundance  of 
stock  characters ;  to  set  forth  the  manners  and  concerns 
of  this  world  largely  in  a  \dvid  human  way,  to  be,  as  it 
were  a  public  historian,  not  a  writer  of  private  mem- 
oirs, is  Scott's  scope.  The  fortunes  of  the  individuals 
being  inserted  in  tliis  environing  world,  much  as  the  dia- 
lect is  inlaid  in  the  English,  the  progress  of  the  tale  is 
managed  by  a  succession  of  scenes.  Scott's  greatest  tal- 
ent of  execution  lay  in  the  depicting  of  these  scenes ;  if  he 
was  not  a  dramatist,  there  was  something  theatrical  in 
his  faculty,  and  though  he  could  not  write  a  play,  no  one 
could  better  stage  an  incident.  These  scenes  are  of  all 
kinds;  indoor  scenes  with  the  fidehty  of  Dutch  mas- 
ters, such  as  the  hut  in  "  Rob  Roy  "  or  Noma's  dwelUng; 
out-of-door  scenes  of  infinite  variety  hke  the  vengeance 
of  Rob's  wife  or  the  drover's  foray  at  the  end;  scenes  of 
all  degrees  of  spirited  action  and  emotional  play,  or  sim- 
ple instances  of  noble  behaviour  hke  the  farewell  of  the 
prince  in  "  Redgauntlet.  "  Scott  has  an  unrivalled  power 
of  realizing  life  at  such  times,  and  here  he  centres  hu- 
man interest,  while  about  this  incessant  stream  of  inci- 
dents conducted  by  persons  suffering  and  doing  there  is 
constantly  felt  the  play  of  great  forces,  social,  pohtical, 

[59] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
hcrcditar}',  Ihc  sense  of  life  as  an  element  in  which  lives 
exist  and  here  presented  especially  and  most  powerfully 
as  a  tiling  of  liistory  and  nationaUty. 

Such  a  presentation  of  national  history  and  manners, 
maintaining  a  permanent  hold  on  the  people  whom  it 
depicts,  must  necessarily  have  great  veracity.  Imagi- 
nation could  not  part  company  with  fact  in  such  a  case. 
The  basis  of  reality  in  the  Waverley  Novels  is  one  of  their 
most  distinguishing  qualities,  and  underlies  their  en- 
durance in  literature.  It  is  not  merely  that  particular 
characters  are  studied  from  life ;  that  George  Constable 
and  John  Clerk  sat  for  "The  Antiquary,"  that  Scott 
liimself  is  Mr.  Mannering,  that  Laidlaw  or  another  is 
Dandie  Dinmont;  nor  is  it  that  other  characters,  like 
Meg  Merrillies  and  the  gypsies  are  suggestions  from 
hving  figures  that  had  arrested  the  author's  passing 
glance.  It  is  not  that  the  scene  of  "  Castle  Dangerous  " 
is  governed  by  what  his  eye  beheld  on  his  visit  there,  or 
the  whole  landscape  of  "The  Pirate"  transcribed  from 
liis  voyages  among  the  islands  of  the  north.  Still  less  is 
it  what  he  gained  from  books,  either  of  ordinary  history 
and  records  of  events  or  such  sermons  as  those  from 
which  he  transferred  the  dark  and  intense  eloquence  of 
"  Old  Mortahty.  "  He  had  such  a  marvellous  memor}^  for 
whatever  bore  the  national  stamp,  he  was  so  brain- 
packed  with  the  ocular  and  audible  experience  of  liis 

[GO] 


SCOTT 
converse  with  the  people,  so  full  of  their  physiognomy, 
gesture  and  phrase,  that  he  fed  his  narrative  incessantly 
with  actuahty;  and  such  was  his  surplus  of  treasure  of 
this  sort  that  in  his  general  edition  he  continued  to  pour 
out  an  illustrative  stream  of  anecdote,  reminiscence  and 
antiquarian  lore  in  the  notes  and  prefaces.  A  keen  friend 
was  confirmed  in  his  belief  of  Scott's  authorship  by  the 
presence  of  a  striking  phrase  that  he  had  heard  him  once 
use.  The  Scotch  novels  are,  as  it  were,  an  amalgam  of 
memory.  When  he  came  to  write  them  all  his  love  of  tradi- 
tion and  the  country-side  with  which  his  mind  was  im- 
pregnated was  precipitated  in  an  unfaihng  flow.  It  was 
because  Scott  was  so  much  alive  with  Scotland  that  he 
made  his  imaginary  characters  live  with  that  intense 
reality,  that  instant  conviction  of  their  truth,  in  which 
he  is  to  be  compared  only  with  Shakspere.  It  is  true  that 
it  was  a  man  of  letters  who  wrote  the  Waverley  Novels,  a 
mind  fed  on  the  stuff  of  mediaeval  romance  and  on  the 
tradition  of  the  English  drama,  the  "  old  play  "  of  which 
he  was  so  fond ;  but  the  literary  element  in  the  tales  is  a 
tiling  of  allusion,  hke  Waverley's  studies,  or  episodical  as 
in  the  character  of  Bunce  or  on  a  more  important  scale 
of  Sir  Percie  Shafton,  or  else  its  rambling  antiquarianism 
serves  to  set  forth  Scotch  pedantry  appropriately.  The 
Waverley  Novels  are  not  a  development  out  of  older  litera- 
ture, they  are  an  original  growth,  a  fresh  form  of  the 

[61] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
imaginative  interpretation  of  the  human  past,  a  new  and 
vital  rendering  straight  from  the  Hfe.  Even  in  the  talcs 
whose  scene  is  laid  in  England  and  the  continent,  where 
Scott  was  more  dependent  on  printed  sources,  the  liter- 
ary element  is  Httle  more  perceptible  than  in  the 
Scotch  novels  themselves;  the  sense  of  reality  in  them  is 
not  appreciably  less.  But  Scott  already  had  the  best  his- 
torical education  as  a  living  discipline  in  assimilating  his 
own  country  and  he  came  to  the  interpretation  of  history 
in  other  lands  with  trained  powers  of  understanding  and 
imagination  in  that  field.  A  distinguished  historian  once 
expressed  to  me  his  admiration  for  "  Count  Robert  of 
Paris,"  and  I  was  glad  to  find  such  unexpected  support 
for  my  own  liking  of  this  novel,  which  is  generally  re- 
garded, I  believe,  as  a  pitiable  example  of  Scott's  men- 
tal decline;  but  my  friend  had  been  struck,  he  said,  by 
its  remarkable  grasp  of  history,  its  brilliant  adequacy  in 
that  way.  It  was  the  same  power  with  wliich  Scott  had 
grasped  "  Ivanhoe, "  and  told  the  tale  of  Quentin  Dur- 
ward,  and  made  Richard  Lion-heart  Uke  one  of  Shaks- 
pcrc's  kings.  lie  had  learned  the  way  by  making  history 
alive  on  liis  own  heath  in  the  most  living  contact  with 
the  past  that  ever  man  had. 

Veracity  is  the  first  great  quality  of  the  Waverley 
Novels.  The  second  is  emotional  power.  Scott  was  a 
man  of  strength ;  he  liked  strong  deeds  and  strong  men ; 

[C2] 


SCOTT 
and  he  liked  strong  emotions.  I  do  not  mean  the  passion 
of  love,  in  which  he  showed  Uttle  interest.  The  way  of  a 
man  with  a  maid  was  not  to  Iiim  the  whole  of  life.  In  the 
national  temperament  in  its  action  in  liistory  he  found 
two  great  emotions :  the  passion  of  loyalty,  wliich  was  in- 
carnate in  the  Cavahers  and  clans,  and  the  enthusiasm  of 
religion  wliich  filled  the  Covenanters.  These  were  social 
forces  and  supported  a  hfelong  character  in  men.  They 
gave  ideal  elevation  to  the  tragic  and  cruel  events  which 
belong  to  Scotch  history,  and  made  an  atmosphere  about 
the  actors  which  glowed  with  life.  Scott  shared  to  the  full 
the  national  capacity  for  enthusiasm,  and  was  in  his  own 
imaginary  world  as  much  a  Jacobite  as  he  was  a  border- 
raider;  and  he  put  into  his  representation  a  fervour 
hardly  less  than  contemporary.  He  was  master,  too,  on 
the  scale  of  private  as  opposed  to  public  feeling,  of  all 
the  moods  of  sorrow  and  especially  of  that  dark  brood- 
ing spirit,  frequent  in  the  Scotch  character,  which  he  has 
repeatedly  drawn.  Such  emotion,  in  the  people  or  in  in- 
dividuals, is  the  crucible  of  romance.  He  used  its  fires  to 
the  full.  Whether  the  scene  be  battle-broad  or  dungeon- 
narrow,  whether  the  passion  involves  the  fortune  of  a 
crown  or  burns  in  the  single  breast  of  Ravenswood, 
he  finds  in  these  deep-flowing  and  overmastering  hu- 
man feelings  the  ideal  substance  which  makes  liis  ro- 
mances so  charged  with  power  over  the  heart,  with  the 

[G3] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
essential  meaning  of  human  life,  in  its  course  in  char- 
acter, and  at  its  moments  of  personal  crisis.  The  homo- 
geneity of  this  power  of  passion  with  the  events  of 
Scotch  history  and  with  the  character  of  the  people  is 
complete,  the  unity  of  the  whole  is  reinforced  by  the  ro- 
mantic quaUty  of  the  landscape,  which  is  its  appropri- 
ate setting.  The  state  of  society,  its  stage  in  civilization » 
is  also  in  keeping.  It  is,  in  fact,  a  kind  of  Homeric  world, 
without  any  f ancif ulness ;  or  if,  when  the  parallel  is 
stated  the  difference  is  more  felt  than  the  likeness,  it 
is  a  world  of  free  action,  bold  character,  primitive 
customs,  as  well  as  of  high  feeling  and  enterprise,  such 
as  has  fallen  to  the  lot  of  no  other  author  since  Homer  to 
depict  with  the  same  breadth  and  elevation.  It  was  good 
fortune  for  Scott,  too,  that  he  could  follow  Shakspere's 
example  in  reUeving  the  serious  scene  with  humour.  It  is 
humour  of  the  first  quality,  wliich  lies  in  character  itself 
and  not  in  farcical  action  or  the  buffoonery  of  words.  It 
centres  in  and  proceeds  from  eccentricity,  in  which  the 
Scottish  character  is  also  rich;  nor  in  general  is  the  ec- 
centricity overstrained  or  monotonously  insisted  on. 
Scott  is  very  tender  of  his  fools,  whose  defectiveness  in 
nature  is  never  made  a  reproach  or  cruel  burden  to  them- 
selves ;  and  the  humorous  side  of  his  serious  characters 
only  completes  their  humanity.  All  parts  of  life  thus  en- 
ter into  his  general  material,  but  harmoniously.  His  share 

[64] 


SCOTT 
of  artistic  power  was  instinctive;  he  was  never  very  con- 
scious of  it;  but  it  was  most  remarkable  in  the  perfect 
blend  he  made  of  the  elements  used.  "  The  Pirate  "  is  an 
admirable  example.  It  is  a  sea  story,  and  takes  its  whole 
atmosphere  from  the  coasts  where  its  action  lies.  The 
struggle  with  the  elements  in  Mordaunt's  opening  jour- 
ney is  like  an  overture;  the  rescue  of  the  sailor-castaway, 
the  cliff -setting  of  Mertoun's  house,  the  old  Norse  of  the 
patriarch's  home,  and  the  life  of  the  beach  there  with  its 
fishing  fleet,  the  superstitious  character  of  Noma  the 
weird  familiar  of  the  winds,  the  bardic  lays  of  Claude 
Halcro,  the  sentimental  pirate-father  and  the  son  with 
his  crew,  the  secret  of  the  past  which  unlocks  the  plot  — 
all  these  make  a  combination  of  land,  character  and 
story,  each  raised  in  power  by  imaginative  treatment  to 
a  romantic  height  and  echoing  the  same  note  of  the  sea 
one  to  the  other  in  a  blend  as  naturally  one  as  sky,  cliff 
and  weather.  As  a  sea  piece,  given  by  character  and 
event  as  well  as  by  description,  it  is  an  unrivalled  work, 
and  this  is  due  to  its  artistic  keeping.  This  power  of 
blend  was  an  essential  element  in  Scott's  genius;  by  it 
his  romance  becomes  integral  in  plot,  character  and  set- 
ting ;  and  this  felicity  of  composition  achieves  in  its  own 
way  the  same  end  in  artistic  effect  that  is  sought  in  an- 
other way  by  construction  in  the  strict  sense.  Scott  never 
fails  in  unity  of  feeling ;  it  was  a  part  of  his  emotional  gift. 

[65] 


GRKAT  WRITERS 
The  third  commanding  trait  of  the  Wavcrley  Novels  is 
creative  power.  It  is  this  that  places  Scott  among  the 
greatest  imaginative  prose  writers  of  the  world,  and 
makes  him  the  first  of  romancers  as  Shakspcrc  is  the  first 
of  dramatists.  He  had  that  highest  faculty  of  genius 
which  works  with  the  simplicity  of  nature  herself  and 
has  something  magical  in  its  immediacy,  in  the  way  in 
wliich  it  escapes  observation  and  in  its  instant  success; 
he  speaks  the  word,  and  there  is  a  world  of  men,  moving, 
acting,  suffering  in  the  wholeness  of  life.  These  masters 
of  imagination,  too,  have  as  many  moulds  as  nature; 
whoever  appears  on  the  scene  of  Homer  or  Shakspere, 
no  one  is  surprised ;  and  Scott  was  as  fertile  as  any  of  his 
kind.  He  is  a  master  of  behaviour,  for  both  gentleman 
and  peasant,  and  of  the  phrases  that  seem  the  very 
speech  of  a  man's  mouth.  The  world  of  gentlemen  is 
represented  in  its  motives  and  interests,  its  sacrifices  and 
ideas  for  both  age  and  youth,  with  a  s}Tnpathctic  com- 
prehension that  makes  it  seem  the  most  just  tribute  ever 
given  to  the  essential  nobility  of  that  kind  of  life,  aristo- 
cratic in  ideal,  warring,  terrible  in  what  it  did  and  what 
it  suffered,  but  habitually  moving  in  a  high  plane  of  con- 
duct and  having  for  its  life-breath  that  passion  of  loyalty, 
wliich  however  unreasoning,  or  mistaken,  is  one  of  the 
glorious  \drtues  of  men.  The  world  of  humble  life,  like- 
wise, is  rendered  with  vivid  truth  in  its  pursuits,  trials 

[66] 


SCOTT 

and  submissions,  the  virtues  welling  from  the  blood  itself 
in  peril,  sorrow,  natural  affection,  for  man  and  woman, 
for  every  time  of  life  and  in  every  station  of  the  poor.  It 
is  in  the  language  of  these  characters  that  the  life  lies 
with  most  efficacy;  only  nature  makes  men  and  wo- 
men who  can  speak  thus ;  and  the  sohdity  of  their  speech 
is  a  part  of  the  simplicity  of  their  fives.  Cuddle's  mother 
in  "  Old  Mortality, "  the  old  fisherman,  Macklebackit, 
in  "The  Antiquary,"  Jennie  Deans  in  "The  Heart 
of  Midlothian"  are  examples;  but  Scott's  truth  of 
touch  in  such  dealing  with  the  poor  is  unfailing.  K 
the  behaviour  of  his  gentlemen  appeals  to  the  sense 
of  chivalry  in  every  generous  breast,  the  words  of  his 
humble  persons  go  straight  to  the  heart  of  all  human- 
ity. In  both  classes  there  is  a  vitafity  that  is  distinguish- 
able from  life  itself  only  by  its  higher  power.  He  creates 
from  within ;  he  shows  character  in  action  so  fused  that 
the  being  and  the  doing  are  one;  he  achieves  expression 
in  its  highest  form  —  the  expression  of  a  soul  using  its 
human  powers  in  earthly  life.  Tliis  is  the  creative  act; 
not  the  scientific  exhibit  of  the  development  of  charac- 
ter, not  the  analytic  examination  of  psychology  and 
motivation,  for  which  inferior  talent  suffices;  but  the  re- 
vealing flash  of  genius  which  shows  the  fair  soul  in  the 
fair  act,  be  it  in  the  highest  or  the  lowest  of  men,  in  good 
fortune  or  bad,  triumphant  or  tragic,  or  on  the  level  of  all 

[67] 


CHEAT  WRITERS 
men's  d.ays.  It  bclon<^c(l  to  Scott's  fonccption  of  life  tliat 
character  and  act  should  be  in  perfect  ecjuipoisc;  to  find 
them  so  is  the  supreme  moment  of  art.  It  was  the  mo- 
ment of  Shakspere  and  Homer,  in  drama  and  epic ;  and 
it  is  the  moment  of  Scott  in  the  novel.  The  Hving  power 
of  his  men  and  women  by  virtue  of  which  once  in  the 
mind  they  never  die  out  of  it,  but  remain  with  the  other 
enduring  figures  of  imagination,  "forms  more  real  than 
living  man, "  proceeds  from  this  union  of  passion,  truth 
and  creative  power  with  the  form  and  pressure  of  hfe 
itself.  The  material  is  always  noble,  and  the  form  into 
which  Scott  throws  it  is  manly.  The  impression  of  all  he 
creates  is  of  nobihty;  not  the  nobility  that  requires  high 
cultivation  or  special  consecration  to  supreme  self- 
sacrifice,  but  such  nobility  as  is  within  the  reach  of  most 
men,  to  be  honest  and  brave,  tender  and  strong,  simple, 
true  and  gallant,  fair  to  a  foe  and  faithful  to  our  own. 
Scott  was  not  greatly  interested  in  intellect;  it  plays  no 
part  in  his  work  as  a  governing  principle;  but  in  this  ne- 
glect of  it  he  kept  the  true  perspective  of  human  life;  in- 
deed —  though  this  may  seem  a  hard  saj'ing  —  his  un- 
conscious subordination  of  the  intellectual  to  the  active 
virtues  and  powers  is  one  great  cornerstone  of  his  sanity 
and  wholesomeness. 

The  Waverley  Novels  made  Scott  one  of  the  famous 
men  of  Europe;  he  held  a  place  of  distinction  unshared 

[68] 


SCOTT 
at  home,  the  idol  of  his  own  country,  and  honoured  and 
beloved  in  every  Enghsh-speaking  land.  He  also,  as  is 
well  known,  made  a  great  deal  of  money  by  them;  and 
Scott  was  glad  to  make  money.  He  spent  it  in  a  magnifi- 
cent way,  and  here  the  trait  of  Quixotism  is  very  ob- 
vious. Abbotsford,  his  most  human  monument,  may  be 
described  as  a  romantic  work,  the  material  counterpart 
to  his  estate  in  imagination.  Don  Quixote  sought  the 
chivalric  past  which  was  the  life  of  his  brain,  in  contem- 
porary Spain;  and  with  a  touch  of  the  same  madness 
Scott  desired  to  realize  on  the  banks  of  the  Tweed 
something  of  that  old  baronial  life  which  was  so  large  a 
part  of  his  memory  and  imagination;  he  added  farm  to 
farm  till  he  had  obtained  a  considerable  domain,  he 
built  a  mansion,  he  gathered  there  the  museum  of  relics 
of  crown,  battle  and  clan  which  is  still  intact,  and  there 
he  dispensed  hospitality  with  ancient  generosity,  as  the 
representative  of  his  country  as  well  as  to  his  friends  and 
dependents  with  a  shadow  at  least  of  feudal  state.  It  was 
a  dream  that  almost  came  to  pass.  But  at  the  moment  of 
its  realization  the  crash  in  his  fortunes  occurred  which 
condemned  him  to  spend  the  remainder  of  his  days  in  a 
heroic  effort  to  die  an  honest  man.  The  secret  of  the  au- 
thorship of  "  Waverley  "  was  well  kept  on  the  whole;  at 
first  it  was  probably  merely  a  means  of  guarding  his  repu- 
tation which  he  did  not  wish  to  expose  to  the  risk  of  fail- 

[69] 


(IREAT  WHITEKS 
urc  as  a  novelist;  afterwards,  it  was  useful  as  a  means  of 
exciting  interest  and  there  was  no  particular  reason  to 
change.  There  was  another  secret,  however,  lliat  h.-ul 
been  much  better  kept  —  the  fact  that  he  was  a  com- 
mercial partner  with  the  printer,  Ballantyne;  and  the 
occasion  of  his  secretiveness  in  tliis  case  was  that  an  in- 
terest in  trade  would  have  been  regarded  as  inconsistent 
with  his  professional  position  as  a  Lawyer.  The  secretive- 
ness, the  willingness  to  go  into  trade,  the  love  of  money 
can  be  turned  against  Scott;  but,  to  my  mind,  they  only 
make  him  more  human,  a  natural  man.  Scott's  practical 
attitude  toward  life,  and  also  toward  literature  itself  as  a 
profession  like  any  other,  seems  not  unlike  that  of 
Shakspere;  it  is  the  mortal  side  of  the  immortal  genius 
wliich  in  its  own  realm  was  loosened  from  the  sense 
of  reality  and  lived  in  an  imaginary  world.  Scott  met 
the  situation  that  confronted  him  with  courage,  an  un- 
wearied labour,  a  reckless  expenditure  of  mental  power 
and  physical  health  which  again  illustrates  the  marvel- 
lous tenacity  of  his  nature.  He  held  on  till  he  died.  The 
story  of  the  last  days  and  the  voyage  to  Italy  is  well 
known.  He  was  a  failing  man.  He  still  held  the  place  of 
honour  which  he  had  won  in  men's  minds,  the  love  of  his 
own  and  the  respect  of  foreign  nations.  Goethe  saluted 
him  almost  from  his  death-bed;  and  soon  after  Scott 
himself  passed  away  at  Abbotsford. 

[70] 


SCOTT 

The  fruit  of  Scott's  life  is  an  immeasurable  good. 
There  is  the  life  itself,  as  full  of  kindliness  as  of  energy, 
of  duty  as  of  honour,  incessant  in  activity,  many-sided, 
patient  in  official  routine,  with  country  loves,  with  re- 
finement, blameless  in  the  relations  of  son,  brother,  hus- 
band, father  and  friend,  with  room  for  the  affections  of 
dogs  and  horses  and  all  God's  creatures ;  a  life,  not  saint- 
ly as  we  wish  the  lives  of  women  to  be,  not  without  weak- 
ness, but  a  source  of  strength  to  others,  with  the  right 
humilities  and  the  right  prides,  unshaken  in  its  loyalties, 
a  man's  life.  There  are  the  works,  which  have  been  the 
delight  of  millions  of  homes  through  four-score  years.  I 
remember  one  summer  seeing  a  boy  of  six  enacting  Rob 
Roy,  and  not  long  after  hearing  Lowell  tell  me  just 
before  he  died  that  he  had  lately  read  the  Waverley 
Novels  through  again  with  much  happiness ;  genius  with 
a  reach  like  that  will  defy  time  long.  I  have  read  them 
myself  repeatedly  in  the  passing  of  years,  and  always 
with  a  greater  admiration  of  their  literary  power,  their 
sheer  creative  faculty,  their  high  strain  of  feeling  and  hu- 
man truth,  and  their  wholesomeness  for  the  daily  sym- 
pathies and  moral  ideals  of  the  democracy.  They  are  a 
great  feature  in  English  literature.  They  lie  massive, 
like  Ben  Ne\'is  and  Loch  Lomond,  in  the  geography  of 
the  soul's  country,  where  she  builds  her  earthly  man- 
sions. One  takes  leave  of  them,  for  a  time,  but  he  closes 

[71] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
the  volume,  whatever  it  may  be,  with  Tennyson's  ex- 
clamation in  his  heart: 

"  O  great  and  gallant  Scott, 
True  gentleman,  heart,  blood,  and  bone, 
I  would  it  had  been  my  lot 
To  have  seen  thee,  and  lieard  thee,  and  known." 


[72] 


Great  Writers 


m 


MILTON 


In  the  old  American  mind  there  are  some  books  that 
neighbour  the  Bible  in  their  appeal  to  the  affections. 
Milton,  Bunyan,  and  Cowper  have  this  distinction. 
They  were  the  books  which  in  my  boyhood  I  was  al- 
lowed to  read  on  the  Sabbath  day  —  old  New  Eng- 
land Sundays,  days  of  halcyon  memory,  true  bridals 
of  the  earth  and  sky,  brooded  on  by  an  unshared  peace 
that  no  desert  solitude  or  mountain  beauty  ever  knew; 
the  yellowing  pages  of  the  worn  books  still  exliale  odours 
of  those  old  summers.  It  is,  perhaps,  not  over-curious  to 
think  that  the  honour  of  literature,  in  our  earlier  age, 
owed  much  to  the  fact  that  the  living  faith  of  the  people 
was  the  religion  of  a  book;  and  in  times  when,  as  we 
learn  from  many  a  pious  memoir,  the  child  in  the  cradle 
was  sometimes  "  dedicated  to  God,"  on  both  sides  of  the 
water  the  thought  might  well  grow  up  in  the  boy's  mind, 
unconsciously  flowering,  that  as  God  had  once  spoken 

[75] 


GREAT  WRITERS 

through  a  hook,  the  spirit  inif^ht  still  use  the  forins  of 
hipjh  literature  as  its  veliicle,  the  idea  of  the  inspiration 
of  the  literary  life  was  not  far  off  from  him.  Milton  and 
Wordsworth  both  felt  this  sense  of  consecration,  of  be- 
ing men  set  apart,  and  what  from  the  birth  of  Apollo  has 
been  known  to  the  poet  as  the  enthusiasm  of  the  god  in 
him,  they  felt  in  their  breasts,  Milton  more  definitely  and 
Wordsworth  more  abstractly  and  vaguely,  as  a  di\'ine 
prompting  and  motion.  Milton's  addresses  to  the  Muse 
are  too  passionate  to  be  merely  imaginative  flights ;  they 
are  poetic  prayers  to  a  real  presence.  The  singular  tiling 
is  that  this  is  the  view  of  posterity  also  toward  Milton. 
He  lives  as  a  great  and  lonely  figure,  one  of  the  chosen  of 
Israel,  with  an  almost  hieratic  solemnity;  the  blind  old 
man  who  had  seen  heaven  and  its  angels,  the  Creation 
and  the  Fall,  as  none  other  had  ever  beheld  them,  in 
universal  vision.  Even  in  liis  secular  life,  he  seems  an 
apostle  of  liberty,  not  a  statesman  or  a  politician  or  any- 
thing merely  executive  and  official,  but  the  impassioned 
preacher  of  freedom  because  his  own  soul  was  free,  a 
great  declarer  of  the  self-evident  truths  of  man.  But  it  is 
the  "  Paradise  Lost "  that  gives  him  his  sacred  charac- 
ter. It  is  a  poem  on  the  highest  levels  of  art,  derived  from 
ancient  and  foreign  sources,  panoplied  in  severe  scholar- 
ship, wrought  in  the  inspiration  of  classicism,  academic, 
intellectual,  austere;  and  yet  it  made,  and  continued  to 

[76] 


MILTON 
make,  and  still  makes  such  a  wide  popular  appeal  as  to 
constitute  it  one  of  the  greatest  monuments  of  English 
literature,  without  regard  to  the  judgment  of  scholars.  It 
is  not  only  a  book ;  it  is  a  part  of  English  history,  of  the 
history  of  the  English  race.  This  is  the  marvel  —  and  no 
critical  problem  is  more  difficult  —  what  are  the 
grounds  of  this  broad  appeal  in  a  poem  which  appears  in 
many  ways  so  far  from  the  people  ? 

Milton  was  born  a  Londoner  in  that  class  of  society 
which  was  the  backbone  of  the  movement  for  popular 
rights  and  independence  in  religion,  in  whose  onward 
course,  during  his  mature  life,  the  throne  fell  and  Eng- 
lish liberties  were  secured.  Little  survives  to  inform  us  of 
his  childhood  except  the  head  of  the  fair  boy  wliich  is 
one  of  the  treasures  of  English  portraiture.  He  was  well- 
bred  in  a  Puritan  home  of  means  and  taste,  and  though 
there  is  no  sign  of  rigour  in  his  bringing  up,  in  that  home 
must  have  been  implanted  in  him  in  early  days  those 
finer  elements  of  Puritanism  which  seem  already  in- 
stinctive in  his  first  youth.  His  father  who  was  a  scriv- 
ener had  some  merit  as  a  musical  composer,  and  was  in 
prosperous  circumstances.  He  had  masters  for  the  boy 
and  sent  him  to  a  public  school,  St.  Paul's,  where  he 
made  one  deep  and  tender  friendship  with  a  half- Italian 
schoolmate,  Charles  Diodati.  At  sixteen  he  went  up  to 
Christ's  College,  Cambridge,  where  tradition  says  he 

[77] 


GREAT  VVIIITEHS 
was  called  "the  Lady  of  Christ's,"  his  fair  hair  and 
bright  cheeks  and  his  slender  youth  confirming  a  nick- 
name that  he  appears  to  have  owed  really  to  the  purity  of 
his  life  and  manners  and  a  virginal  mind.  He  remained 
seven  years  at  Christ's,  and  won  the  place  of  a  first 
scholar,  showing  plain  traces  of  that  saving  egotism 
which  is  the  single  trait  that  brings  him  humanly  before 
the  eye  now :  "  performed  the  Collegiate  and  Academical 
exercises  to  the  admiration  of  all,  and  was  esteemed  to 
be  a  virtuous  and  sober  person,"  says  old  Anthony 
Wood,  "yet  not  to  be  ignorant  of  his  own  parts."  At 
Christ's  he  had  written  verses,  Latin  and  English, 
among  them  the  famous  ode  on  the  morning  of  Christ's 
Nativity;  and  he  showed  from  the  first  touches  of  his 
hand  that  feeling  for  rich  words  and  their  melodies,  the 
sense  of  the  moulding  that  beauty  of  language  gives  to 
thought  itself,  which  belongs  so  often  to  the  poetic  pre- 
cocity of  great  masters  of  expression.  There  was  never 
any  immaturity  in  his  style.  He  wrote  perfection.  Yet 
then,  of  course,  no  one  knew  that  he  had  written  one  of 
the  great  lyric  poems  of  England,  singular  for  its  ma- 
jesty of  thought  and  manner  in  a  youth  of  twenty-one 
years,  and  a  sonnet  —  that  on  arriving  at  the  age  of 
twenty-three  —  which,  in  his  works,  is  one  of  the  best 
remembered  where  all  are  memorable. 

He  retired  from  the  University  to  Horton,  near  Wind- 
[78] 


MILTON 
sor,  where  his  father  had  now  removed  from  London  to 
live  at  ease;  and  there,  the  church,  his  original  destina- 
tion, being  closed  to  him  by  the  aspect  of  the  times, 
without  seeldng  another  profession,  he  obtained  his 
father's  leave  to  pursue  literary  studies  undisturbed. 
"  At  my  father's  country  residence,  whither  he  had  re- 
tired to  pass  his  old  age,  I  was  wholly  intent,"  says  Mil- 
ton, "  through  a  period  of  absolute  leisure,  on  a  steady 
perusal  of  the  Greek  and  Latin  writers,  but  still  so  that  I 
occasionally  exchanged  the  country  for  the  city,  either 
for  the  purpose  of  buying  books,  or  for  that  of  learning 
anytliing  new  in  mathematics  or  in  music,  in  which  I 
then  took  delight."  For  the  six  years  that  remained  till 
he  was  thirty,  he  thus  enjoyed  a  secure  and  quiet  period, 
comparable  to  Virgil's  ease,  during  which  he  perfected 
himself  in  a  studious  knowledge  of  past  literature.  It  was 
an  accumulative  and  assimilating  rather  than  an  orig- 
inal period ;  liis  production  of  English  verse  was  hardly 
greater  in  amount  than  Virgil's  in  similar  circumstances ; 
yet  in  its  small  body  are  comprised  all  Milton's  minor 
poems  of  fame,  and  among  them  are  "  L' Allegro  "  and 
"II  Penseroso,"  the  best  idyllic  poems  in  the  classical 
Italian  manner;  "Lycidas,"  the  first  of  English  elegies 
in  rank;  and  "Comus,"  the  only  English  masque  that 
the  world  has  cared  to  remember.  These  poems  are  the 
finest  flower  of  the  great  literary  movement  that  had 

[79] 


CHEAT  WRITERS 
swept  up  the  north  from  Italy  for  moro  than  a  century, 
and  brought  to  England  its  great  burst  of  genius  in  the 
reigns  of  Elizabeth  and  James;  the  crest  of  the  Renais- 
sance had  broken  in  the  turbulent  dramatists,  but  here 
the  golden  flood  of  humanism  was  still  at  the  full,  with 
Italian  serenity,  purity,  and  beauty;  the  burning  noon  of 
passion  had  gone  by,  but  a  finer  art,  a  softer  mood  were 
present  in  Milton's  genius  in  its  youth,  simple,  lucid, 
melodious,  suffused  with  the  perfect  beauty  of  an  age  of 
art  about  to  die.  In  these  country  years  Milton  probably 
looked  forward  only  to  a  literary  career;  he  was  a  youth- 
ful, humanist  poet  seeking  to  write  as  his  Greek  and 
Italian  masters  had  done  before  him ;  perhaps  such  a  life 
as  Virgil's,  he  thought,  might  he  in  liis  future.  These 
were  the  first  happy  fruits. 

The  figure  of  Milton  at  this  age  is  full  of  "sweet  at- 
tractive grace."  He  was  handsome  in  manly  beauty,  his 
mind  set  on  high  and  serious  thoughts,  and  with  a  strain 
of  uncommon  purity  in  his  soul.  He  led  a  simple  life  in 
his  father's  house,  plain  in  its  habits ;  he  wandered  about 
the  well-watered  and  well-wooded  countr}%  making  his 
mind  "  a  mansion  for  all  lovely  forms  —  a  dwelling 
place  for  all  sweet  sounds  and  harmonies,"  or  in  his 
chamber  at  home  moved  "in  the  still  air  of  delightful 
studies;"  a  natural,  intellectual,  poetic  life,  free  from  all 
disturbance.   One  hears  that   "music"   in   which   he 

[80] 


MILTON 
"  then  took  delight "  as  its  perpetual  undertone.  It  is  re- 
flected crystal-like  in  the  "L' Allegro"  and  ''II  Pense- 
roso,"  with  a  selective  power  of  art,  an  idyllic  brevity 
and  clearness  in  the  scenes,  an  evenness  of  unemphatic 
beauty,  for  which  there  is  no  parallel  except  in  classical 
and  Italian  masterpieces.  This  poetic  softness  and  clear- 
ness mirrors  Milton's  temper  then;  there  is  not  a  trace  of 
the  harsh  traits  that  later  came  into  his  life,  the  stern- 
ness of  his  middle  years  and  his  aging  into  austerity.  He 
was  still  a  pure  poet;  full  of  a  sweet  sensuousness  that 
took  delight  in  all  beautiful  things;  he  was  a  lover  of 
beauty.  "  What  besides  God  has  resolved  concerning  me 
I  know  not,  but  this  at  least "  —  he  is  writing  to  a  friend 
—  "  He  has  instilled  into  me  at  all  events  a  vehement  love 
of  the  beautiful.  Not  with  so  much  labour  as  the  fables 
have  it,  is  Ceres  said  to  have  sought  her  daughter  Pro- 
serpine, as  I  am  wont  day  and  night  to  seek  for  this  idea 
of  the  beautiful  through  all  the  forms  and  faces  of  things 
(for  many  are  the  shapes  of  things  divine)  and  to  follow 
it  leading  me  on  as  with  certain  assured  traces."  This  is 
Plato's  voice  on  the  lips  of  the  young  Puritan  disciple  of 
the  "  Phsedrus,"  but  it  denotes  the  enthusiasm  of  his  soul 
and  its  poetic  direction.  Tills  Platonic  vein,  this  emo- 
tional colour  of  beauty  in  his  virtue  sets  Milton's  Puri- 
tanism somewhat  apart.  So  also  his  love  of  the  drama 
removes  him  from  the  historical  type  of  the  sect.  He 

[81] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
could  not,  being  a  scholar  of  classical  breeding,  fail  to 
look  on  the  drama  as  a  noble  form,  and  its  Greek  exam- 
ples fed  his  genius  from  the  Euripidean  passages  of 
"Comus"  to  the  "Samson  Agonistes"  at  the  very  end. 
But  while  yet  a  student  at  college  he  had  written  the  tri- 
bute to  Shakspere  that  was  first  printed  in  the  Second 
Folio;  and  in  connection  with  his  friend,  Lawes,  the 
musician,  he  tried,  though  with  an  anonymity  which  he 
endeavoured  to  preserve,  the  masque  form  of  the  drama, 
then  its  popular  or  at  least  fashionable  phase,  in  the  "  Ar- 
cades "  and  on  the  great  scale  in  the  "  Comus."  This  last 
was  really  a  piece  of  private  theatricals  written  for  the 
Lord-President  of  Wales,  who  had  employed  Lawes, 
and  acted  by  his  children  in  the  great  hall  at  Ludlow 
Castle  on  his  inauguration  into  his  office.  The  substance 
of  the  poem,  however,  which  was  the  praise  and  de- 
fense of  chastity,  was  a  very  noble  form  of  Puritan  feel- 
ing in  the  high  sense.  It,  too,  is  alive  with  Platonic  phil- 
osophy, but  this  is  so  inwrought  in  the  poetry  that  it  is 
not  felt  by  the  reader  except  in  its  results.  The  praise  of 
chastity  also  denotes  something  exceptional  in  Milton's 
temperament,  in  disclosing  which  it  is  necessary  to  use 
his  own  words,  but  with  the  more  happiness  since  the 
passage  opens  with  that  remarkable  sentence  which  is 
the  most  famous  that  came  from  his  pen: 

"  And  long  it  was  not  after,  when  I  was  confirmed  in 
[82] 


MILTON 
this  opinion,  that  he,  who  would  not  be  frustrate  of  his 
hope  to  write  well  hereafter  in  laudable  things,  ought 
himself  to  be  a  true  poem;  that  is,  a  composition  and 
pattern  of  the  best  and  honourablest  things ;  not  presum- 
ing to  sing  high  praises  of  heroic  men,  or  famous  cities, 
unless  he  have  in  himself  the  experience  and  the  prac- 
tice of  all  that  which  is  praiseworthy.  These  reasonings, 
together  with  a  certain  niceness  of  nature,  an  honest 
haughtiness  and  self-esteem,  either  of  what  I  was  or 
what  I  might  be  (which  let  envy  call  pride),  and  lastly 
that  modesty  whereof,  though  not  in  the  title-page, 
I  may  be  excused  to  make  here  some  beseeming  profes- 
sion ;  all  these  uniting  the  supply  of  their  natural  aid  to- 
gether kept  me  still  above  low  descents  of  mind  .  .  . 
Next  (for  hear  me  out  now,  readers),  that  I  may  tell  you 
whither  my  younger  feet  wandered ;  I  betook  me  among 
those  lofty  fables  and  romances  which  recount  in  solemn 
cantos  the  deeds  of  knighthood  founded  by  our  victori- 
ous kings,  and  from  hence  had  in  renown  over  all  Chris- 
tendom. There  I  read  in  the  oath  of  every  knight  that  he 
should  defend  to  the  expense  of  his  best  blood,  or  of  his 
Ufe  if  it  so  befell  liim,  the  honour  and  chastity  of  virgin 
or  matron ;  from  whence  even  then  I  learnt  what  a  noble 
virtue  chastity  sure  must  be,  to  the  defence  of  which  so 
many  worthies  by  such  a  dear  adventure  of  themselves 
had  sworn.     ...     So  that  even  these  books,  which 

[83] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
to  many  others  liavc  been  the  fuel  of  wantonness  anrl 
loose  living,  1  cannot  think  how,  unless  hy  divine  indul- 
gence, proved  to  me  so  many  incitements,  as  you  have 
heard ,  to  the  love  and  steadfast  observation  of  that  vi  rtue . '  * 

In  these  matters,  perhaps,  silence  is  as  golden  in  a 
Galahad  as  in  a  Launcelot,  but  the  openness  of  Milton 
in  tliis  and  other  passages,  is  a  part  of  his  nature  and  be- 
longs to  his  essential  character.  The  personal  feeling  is 
only  an  instance  of  the  purity  that  is  elemental  in  his  en- 
tire genius  wliich  in  the  end  became  a  genius  for  auster- 
ity. But  that  time  was  far  off,  beyond  the  barrier  of 
twenty  years  of  the  fighting  that  makes  all  men  stem. 
The  gentler  Milton  of  the  earlier  day,  the  youth  with  the 
passion  for  purity,  the  passion  for  beauty,  the  passion 
for  perfection  in  poetry,  had  no  premonition  of  what  was 
to  be,  what  truly  "  God  had  resolved"  concerning  hira; 
he  looked,  it  can  hardly  be  doubted,  for  that  Virgihan 
future,  while  he  pursued  his  studies  of  the  most  mel- 
lowed art  of  ci\T[lization  in  the  books  of  Athens,  Rome, 
and  Italy,  and  dreamed  the  dream  of  travel,  fearful  that 
he  had  been  rash  in  allowing  his  friend  Lawes  to  pub- 
lish the  unripe  fruit  of  "  Comus." 

It  was  in  tliis  spirit  that  Milton,  when  thirty  years  old, 
made  the  journey  to  Italy  where  he  remained  more  than 
a  year.  He  must  have  been  heartened  by  the  praise  of  Sir 
Henry  Wotton,  who  gave  him  letters  of  introduction, 

[84] 


MILTON 

saying  of  "  Comus  "  —  "I  should  much  commend  the 
tragical  part,  if  the  lyrical  did  not  ravish  me  with  a  cer- 
tain Doric  dehcacy  in  your  Songs  and  Odes,  whereunto 
I  must  plainly  confess  to  have  seen  yet  nothing  parallel 
in  our  language."  He  met  famous  men,  Grotius  and 
Galileo,  lingered  especially  at  Florence,  Rome,  Naples, 
and  Venice,  made  numerous  friends  among  the  men  of 
letters  and  taste,  and  had  the  great  happiness  to  be  fa- 
voured with  the  acquaintance  and  warm  interest  of  the 
aged  Manso,  the  befriender  of  Tasso  in  his  sad  life,  and 
the  patron  of  Marini.  It  is  plain  that  ISIilton  not  only 
made  a  good  impression,  as  Manso  says,  with  his 
"  mind,  form,  grace,  face,  and  morals,"  but  he  was  so- 
cially attractive ;  notwithstanding  his  strength  of  natural 
reserve  and  what  he  calls  "  haughtiness  "  in  liis  charac- 
ter, his  famihar  relations  with  comrades  and  elder  asso- 
ciates betray  real  humaneness,  and  the  affectionateness 
of  his  single  close  friendsliip  with  Charles  Diodati  inti- 
mates perhaps  the  sweeter  quahty  of  nature  by  which  he 
bound  his  Italian  acquaintances.  He  followed  Wotton's 
wise  and  famous  advice  —  "a  close  tongue  and  an  open 
face  will  go  safely  over  the  whole  world  "  —  indifferent- 
ly, it  is  to  be  feared;  but  he  came  out  of  Italy  safe  to 
Geneva,  and  so  home.  One  wonders  what  he  brought 
away  really  from  the  Italian  beauty  of  scenery,  the  ruins 
and  the  galleries,  but  it  is  a  vain  curiosity;  so  far  as  ap- 

[85] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
pears,  his  life  in  Italy  was  essentially  social,  he  was  inter- 
ested in  the  men  and  their  academies,  and  wrote  Italian 
and  Latin  verses  in  their  midst,  hke  a  dilletante  youth; 
hut  the  great  result  seems  to  have  been  the  stir  of  his 
mind  in  response  to  the  appreciation  of  his  talents  about 
him  and  the  forming  of  a  solid  and  resolved  ambition  to 
produce  a  great  poetic  work.  His  own  words  are  impor- 
tant: "Much  latelier,"  he  writes,  "in  the  private  acad- 
emies of  Italy,  whither  I  was  favoured  to  resort,  per- 
ceiving that  some  trifles  that  I  had  in  memory,  com- 
posed at  under  twenty  or  thereabouts  (for  the  manner  is 
that  every  one  must  give  some  proof  of  his  wit  and  read- 
ing there)  met  with  acceptance  above  what  was  looked 
for;  and  other  tilings,  wliich  I  had  shifted  in  scarcity  of 
books  and  conveniences  to  patch  up  amongst  them,  were 
received  with  written  encomiums,  which  the  ItaUan  is 
not  forward  to  bestow  on  men  of  this  side  the  Alps ;  I  be- 
gan thus  far  to  assent  both  to  them  and  divers  of  my 
friends  here  at  home,  and  not  less  to  an  inward  prompt- 
ing which  now  grew  daily  upon  me,  that  by  labour  and 
intent  study  (which  I  take  to  be  my  portion  in  this  hfe) 
joined  with  the  strong  propensity  of  nature,  I  might  per- 
haps leave  sometliing  so  written  to  aftertimes  as  they 
should  not  willingly  let  it  die."  An  epic  poem  or  a  tragic 
drama  was  to  be  the  form  of  tliis  attempt,  and  he  hstcd 
nigh  a  hundred  subjects  for  choice,  the  chief  being  the 

[8G] 


MILTON 
British  story  of  Arthur's  Knights  and  the  Hebrew 
myth  of  Paradise.  It  might  be  thought  that*  this  \\adth 
of  topic  consorts  but  ill  with  any  theory  of  "  God's  re- 
solve" concerning  him,  and  certainly  Apollo  in  liis  in- 
spiration was  not  wont  to  give  the  priestess  a  hundred 
oracles  to  pick  and  choose ;  but  if  the  academic  and  re- 
flective nature  of  Milton's  muse  is  thus  superficially 
clear,  the  selection  of  the  subject  of  "Paradise  Lost" 
was  not  really  arbitrary,  but  the  choice  along  wliich  the 
character  of  his  life  and  learning  and  the  spirit  of  the 
man  were  felt  in  self -commanding  ways. 

Milton  had  come  home  because  of  the  threatening  as- 
pect of  pubhc  affairs  in  the  same  spirit  in  which  many  of 
our  own  countrymen  returned  at  the  outbreak  of  the  Civil 
War  because  it  is  not  fit  that  a  citizen  should  be  abroad 
(save  in  her  service)  when  his  country  is  in  arms.  But  he 
was  a  private  person  with  no  opening  into  state  affairs ; 
so  he  says  very  sensibly,  "  I  betook  myself  to  my  inter- 
rupted studies,  trusting  the  issue  of  public  affairs  to  God 
in  the  first  place,  and  to  those  to  whom  the  people  had 
committed  that  charge."  Up  to  this  time  Milton  had  de- 
pended on  paternal  support,  and  his  father  had  been  a 
very  good  Augustus  to  him ;  now  he  began  to  earn  some- 
tliing,  and  from  undertaking  the  care  of  his  sister's  two 
young  boys,  he  set  up  gradually  a  little  private  academy 
of  a  half -friendly  character  for  the  children  of  families  in 

[87] 


CJREAT  WRITERS 
his  .'Kquainlancc.  A  few  boys  in  a  liousc  l>i^  cnoii^'h  for 
himself  and  his  books,  many  of  wliich  he  had  collected 
and  sent  from  Venice,  and  with  a  garden  —  he  always 
kept  a  garden  near  in  his  many  changes  of  London  resi- 
dence —  and  with  the  schoolmaster's  task  for  his  use- 
ful employment;  this  was  the  outward  look  of  the  life 
wliich  witliin  was  brooding  the  work  that  the  world 
"  would  not  wilUngly  let  die."  Milton  also  signalized  his 
entrance  on  every-day  affairs  by  taking  a  wife;  strangely 
enough  she  was  of  a  broken-down  worldly  Cavaher  fam- 
ily, wliich  was  much  in  debt  to  liis  father,  and  she  was 
but  just  past  seventeen.  There  was  a  brief  two  months  of 
festivity  in  the  house,  after  which  the  young  bride  re- 
turned to  her  family  for  a  visit,  and  would  not  come 
back  toiler  husband  till  two  years  later  when,  in  the  de- 
clining fortune  of  both  the  Cavalier  cause  and  the  family, 
a  reconciUation  was  arranged.  Meanwhile  Milton  had 
found  an  entrance  to  the  life  of  the  public  cause  as  a  pam- 
phleteer; he  pubUshed  in  swift  succession  several  of  the 
tracts  on  the  times  by  which  for  twenty  years  he  was  to  be 
mainly  known  at  home,  and  to  become  famous  abroad  as 
the  chief  defender  of  the  English  nation  in  the  forum  of 
Europe,  and  in  the  composition  of  wliich  he  expended  his 
intellectual  energy  till  the  last  moment  of  the  lost  cause. 
The  golden  age  of  Milton's  life  had  gone  by;  the 
happy  home  where  he  had  been  the  light  of  the  house  — 

[88] 


MILTON 

and  how  dearly  he  was  cherished  is  humanly  indicated 
by  his  father's  having  two  portraits  of  him  in  boyhood 
and  youth  —  was  broken  up;  Charles  Diodati,  his  first 
and  only  bosom  friend,  was  dead.  Life  had  entered  on  a 
new  scene,  in  which  domestic  unhappiness,  conflict  with 
men,  the  indignation  and  bitter  edge  of  prose  were  in 
sharp  contrast  with  that  early  feUcity,  peace  and  poetic 
musing.  The  change  was  as  deep  as  hfe,  and  in  fact 
amounted  to  a  substitution  of  intellectual  for  poetic 
force  as  the  element  of  its  being.  Up  to  now  Milton's 
thinking  had  been  subsidiary  to  his  art,  but  hencefor- 
ward it  was  for  its  own  sake ;  he  had  been  a  man  of  let- 
ters, he  became  a  man  of  politics.  His  interest  in  ideas 
was  immense,  though  now  it  was  first  apparent.  He  had 
a  greater  intellect  than  commonly  falls  to  the  share  even 
of  great  poets,  and  it  was  of  that  active  sort  that  makes 
the  practical  ideahst.  The  passion  for  perfection  in  art 
which  makes  the  poet,  and  for  purity  in  life  which  makes 
the  man,  are  matters  of  the  private  life,  but  the  applica- 
tion of  analogous  ideas  of  perfection  to  the  fives  of  other 
men  and  to  the  state  necessarily  throws  the  asserter  of 
them  into  opposition,  and  in  so  far  as  he  strives  for  their 
victory  he  finds  oftenest  a  thorny  path.  Milton  now  en- 
tered on  this  career.  His  practical  instinct  working 
through  ideas  is  most  simply  seen  in  the  things  nearest 
to  him.  It  was  no  common  school  that  he  kept,  no  hum- 

[89] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
drum  routine  that  he  mumbled  over  to  his  boys;  there 
was  a  curriculum  of  his  own  devising  and  noticeably  he 
saw  to  it  that  his  boys  read  more  books  that  liad  life  in 
them  and  with  a  broader  reach  of  modem  power,  as  it 
then  was,  than  other  schoolboys  had  any  chance  to  get, 
and  he  put  speed  into  their  acquisition  of  Latin ;  quicker 
work  and  a  wider  and  more  contemporary'  round  of 
study,  and  in  general  the  Renaissance  ideal  of  the  de- 
velopment of  personal  power  in  manifold  ways,  charac- 
terized the  education  he  strove  to  give.  It  was,  no  doubt, 
the  most  modern  school  in  Europe,  though  its  pupils 
were  only  half  a  handful.  His  domestic  Ufe  was,  Uke  the 
school,  a  near  concern ;  and  he  no  sooner  realized  that  his 
young  wife  had  deserted  him  after  two  months  than  he 
at  once  declared  the  extreme  heretical  doctrine  of  hberty 
of  divorce  and  re-marriage  in  case  of  the  incompatibility 
of  the  parties.  It  was  a  shocking  position  to  take,  in  those 
days,  and  first  brought  obloquy  upon  him,  but  he 
stuck  to  his  opinion,  and  indeed  among  the  hundreds  of 
the  sects  of  those  days  one  may  still  read  of  the  ^lilton- 
ists  or  Divorcers.  The  key  to  INIilton's  intellectual  Ufe 
lies  in  his  Renaissance  training,  though  the  fact  is  ob- 
scured by  the  Puritanical  matter  of  liis  tracts ;  personal 
force,  such  as  he  raised  to  heroic  proportions  in  Satan, 
was  his  ideal;  personal  liberty  in  all  its  forms  was  the 
thing  nearest  to  his  heart.  It  gave  great  individuality  to 

[90] 


MILTON 

his  own  life.  Thus  he  belonged  to  no  communion,  at- 
tended no  church,  and  had  no  prayers  at  home;  his  re- 
ligion must  have  been  very  sacred  to  him,  and  it  suffered 
no  profaning  hands;  he  was  true  Puritan,  full  grown, 
not  in  the  sense  of  the  sectaries  of  his  age  but  in  that 
which  is  for  all  time,  the  man  free  from  all  forms  who 
needs  no  intermediary  with  his  God  except  the  spiritual 
Christ.  The  same  proud  assertion  of  individual  dignity 
is  the  core  of  the  great  essay  in  behalf  of  a  free  press,  the 
"  Areopagitica,"  in  which  he  set  forth  the  doctrine  of  the 
public  toleration  of  thought  and  speech,  the  right  of  the 
intellect  to  be  heard,  with  undying  eloquence.  Liberty, 
in  one  form  or  another,  is  the  watchword  of  all  his  prose; 
it  was  then,  as  it  continues  to  be,  the  shuttlecock  be- 
tween statecraft  and  priestcraft,  but  INIilton  saw  the 
old  Priest  in  the  new  Presbyter,  and  in  all  ways  stood  for 
independence  in  the  individual ;  by  so  much  the  more  did 
he  stand  for  independence  in  the  nation,  the  liberty  of 
the  people  to  call  their  rulers  to  the  bar  and  send  the  vio- 
lator of  their  rights  to  the  block;  with  the  vehement  and 
unabated  directness  of  Demosthenes  against  Philip,  he 
too  thundered  against  the  Stuart  line.  The  name  of 
Cromwell  only  was  known  so  far  and  widely  abroad 
as  that  of  this  Defender  of  the  People  of  England.  It  is 
tliis  office  that  gives  grandeur  to  his  figure ;  and  no  one, 
not  of  the  race  itself,  has  so  much  in  the  thoughts  of  men 

[91] 


GREAT  WRITERS 

the  sublime  character  of  a  Hebrew  propliet,  llie  rebiiker 
of  kin^.s,  the  declarer  of  the  eternity  of  truth,  the  com- 
panion of  the  thoughts  of  God.  This  loftiness  felt  in  Mil- 
ton's prose  is  what  preserves  it;  if  it  is  not  studded  with 
sentences  of  abstract  wisdom,  like  Burke's,  where  ripe- 
ness of  thought  and  breadth  of  phrase  combine  to  make 
memorable  political  sayings,  it  is  strewn  with  passages 
of  high  and  sublime  flow  in  which  ideal  principles  flame 
at  their  whitest  heat  of  conviction.  To  be  the  voice  of 
England  on  a  great  occasion,  such  as  the  death  of  her 
king  by  the  judgment  of  her  people,  was  a  memorable 
destiny;  but  what  makes  Milton  more  remembered  is 
that  a  hundred  times  Uberty  spoke  by  his  Ups.  He  was 
that  man,  hateful  to  all  tyrants,  a  Republican;  though 
under  the  powerful  presence  of  Cromwell,  "  our  chief  of 
men,"  he  swerved  slightly  from  the  line,  he  came  home 
true  and  belonged  with  Vane.  He  was  not  a  democrat; 
he  was  too  much  imbedded  in  the  Renaissance  for  that, 
and  valued  men  for  their  personal  distinction;  for  the 
honour  and  force  in  them  that  makes  for  inequaUty : 

"  Nor  do  I  name  of  men  the  common  rovt 
That  wandering  loose  about 
Grotv  up  and  perish  as  the  summer  fly. 
Heads  withoid  name,  no  more  remembered." 

That  is  the  very  trick  of  aristocracy  in  thought  and 
accent.  Equality,  fraternity,  were  not  yet  risen  stars. 

[9^2] 


MILTON 
Milton's  "  Ready  and  Easy  Way,"  which  he  sent  forth 
as  the  last  arrow  when  Charles  II  was  almost  on  the 
coast,  proposed  a  kind  of  permanent  Grand  Council, 
like  that  of  the  Republic  of  Venice,  as  the  ruling  body  of 
the  state.  Nevertheless,  Milton's  republicanism,  though 
it  was  not  the  democracy  of  to-day,  was  the  high  tide  of 
the  principle  of  freedom  in  that  age;  and  when  the  dying 
roll  of  the  retreating  storm  was  heard  in  that  last  pas- 
sionate remonstrance  of  Milton,  on  the  eve  of  the  King's 
landing,  there  was  to  be  silence  till  the  Marseillaise. 

In  these  years  Milton's  hfe  took  on  that  harshness  of 
feature,  which  it  retains  in  tradition,  owing  to  his  invec- 
tive against  the  enemies  of  the  State,  his  unhappiness  in 
his  children,  and  perhaps  the  colour  of  the  name  of  Pur- 
itan. In  outward  ways  it  was  one  of  plain  habits  and 
personal  dignity.  He  had  given  up  teaching  after  seven 
years,  and  when  in  a  short  period  the  Commonwealth 
was  established  he  became  Foreign  Secretary  to  the 
Council;  it  was  a  good  post,  well  paid,  and  he  held  it  till 
the  Restoration  from  his  forty-second  to  his  fifty-second 
year.  He  received  and  wrote  foreign  despatches  and  was 
the  official  intermediary  for  all  ambassadors  and  en- 
voys, and  was  thus  brought  both  at  the  Council  Table 
and  in  the  Hall  into  habitual  association  with  the  heads 
of  State  and  persons  of  distinction  from  abroad.  His  pri- 
vate fame  and  character  were  also  such  as  to  attract  vis- 

[93] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
its  and  attention  upon  his  own  account.  In  his  appear- 
ance and  demeanour  there  must  have  been  the  ripened 
breeding  of  the  scholar  and  poet  whose  social  art  is  at- 
tested by  his  Italian  travels,  together  with  the  matured 
handsomeness  of  the  man  and  the  personal  dignity  of 
the  representative  of  State.  His  wife  had  died  and  he  had 
married  again ;  but  after  a  year  of  happy  wedlock,  in  this 
instance,  he  lost  her  whose  memory  he  made  sacred  in 
the  sonnet  tenderly  recalling  her  veiled  face : 

"  Yet  to  my  fancied  sight 
Love,  sweetness,  goodness,  in  her  person  shined 
So  clear  as  in  no  face  with  more  delight." 

He  may  never  have  seen  her  face,  for  before  this  he  had 
become  totally  blind  in  his  forty-fifth  year.  He  had  con- 
tinued to  perform  the  duties  of  his  Secretaryship,  being 
led  to  the  Council  Room,  and  there  listening,  dictating, 
and  composing  he  went  through  the  necessarj'  business 
as  before.  Except  for  a  few  sonnets  at  wide  inter%'als  he 
had  entirely  discontinued  poetry  during  these  twenty 
years.  Dr.  Johnson  described  these  sonnets  as  "  cherry- 
stones," and  it  has  been  well  said  that  this  "  marks  the 
lowest-point  imaginable  in  criticism  of  verse."  They  are 
rather  stones  of  David's  sling.  That  on  the  massacre  in 
Piedmont  is  noteworthy  as  the  first  blaze  of  the  EngUsh 
muse  over  the  violated  liberties  of  Europe,  which  Byron 
and  Shelley  learned  the  lightning  use  of,  and  whereof 

[94] 


MILTON 
Swinburne  in  our  own  day  flings  the  revolutionary 
torch.  The  sonnets,  few  as  they  are,  would  be  a  mighty 
monument  for  any  genius;  they  have  the  quality  of 
Michaelangelo.  Just  before  the  downfall,  Milton  seems 
to  have  reverted  in  mind  to  the  predestination  of  his 
genius  to  poetry  and  that  great  hope  he  had  indulged  on 
returning  from  Italy :  "  that  what  the  greatest  and  choic- 
est wits  of  Athens,  Rome,  or  modern  Italy,  and  those 
Hebrews  of  old  did  for  their  country,  I,  in  my  propor- 
tion, with  this  over  and  above  of  being  a  Christian, 
might  do  for  mine."  Now  the  end  had  come;  blind  and 
in  hiding,  in  those  months  of  unloosed  revenge,  none, 
the  Regicides  excepted,  was  more  likely  than  he  to  fall  a 
victim ;  and  indeed  few  who  have  escaped  it  came  so  near 
as  Milton  to  being  hanged.  The  peril  of  this  shame  to 
England  —  and  such  shame  there  has  been  in  all  litera- 
tures and  nations  of  civility  —  was  near,  but  it  passed. 
The  "bUnd  old  schoolmaster,"  as  he  is  known  from 
Dryden's  lips,  lived  on  in  obscurity  and  humbleness, 
though  a  few  friends  still  remembered  him  and  showed 
him  attention,  and  distinction  still  clung  to  his  figure. 
Life,  it  must  have  seemed,  was  done  for  him.  Then  he 
turned  to  the  unbroken  meditation  of  that  poem  which 
for  two  years  had  employed  his  thoughts  at  times,  and  in 
three  years  more  of  lonely  musing  carried  it  to  comple- 
tion. A  new  age  of  literature  had  come  in,  and  new  men, 

[95] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
strangers  to  all  that  had  fashioned  the  men  of  old  in  great- 
ness and  him,  the  last  of  them ;  but  the  old  age  should  yet 
lift  one  towering  peak  to  heaven,  before  it  subsided  to 
the  levels  of  the  eighteenth  ccntur}'.  "  Paradise  Lost  "  was 
this  last  and  belated  birth  of  the  greatest  English  age. 

The  opposition  between  the  earlier  and  the  later 
poetry  of  Milton  is  very  great,  and  is  the  more  marked 
because  of  the  barrenness  of  his  middle  life  in  verse. 
The  liquid  flow,  the  beauty  of  surface  locking  in  mosaic 
sweet  sights  and  harmonics  of  the  natural  world,  the 
mellowness  of  idyllic  and  elegaic  art,  the  crj'stal  purity 
of  the  air  of  garden  and  grove  as  in  some  northern  Ital- 
ian night  —  all  these  and  the  like  are  the  traits  of  his 
poetic  youth ;  but  in  the  works  of  his  age  there  is  some- 
tliing  that  dwarfs  such  quahties  and  makes  natural  the 
designation  of  the  earlier  verse  as  his  minor  poems.  The 
reason  of  the  difference  is,  I  think,  the  expansion  of  Mil- 
ton's intellectual  powers  wliich  took  place  on  his  en- 
trance into  public  debate,  and  the  strength  they  ac- 
quired in  that  Herculean  labour  of  the  mind  stretched  to 
its  utmost  of  practical  force  and  mastery  for  twenty 
years  of  unremitted  strain.  "  Paradise  Lost "  is  a  great 
poem  of  the  intellect  as  well  as  of  the  imagination.  Mil- 
ton, after  a  period  of  wavering,  had  finally  chosen  the 
form  of  an  epic,  built  on  the  lines  of  classical  tradition, 
with  the  myth  of  Eden  for  its  central  story;  the  origin 

[96] 


MILTON 
and  destiny  of  the  soul  and  the  meaning  of  its  course  in 
history  was  the  real  theme.  The  subject  was  well 
chosen,  and  fulfilled  the  desirable  though  not  essential 
condition  for  a  work  of  national  appeal  in  that  it  was 
and  had  long  been  familiar  to  the  people;  the  material 
was  at  least  as  well  known  to  the  Enghsh,  in  its  main 
outlines,  as  the  myths  of  the  gods  on  which  the  Attic 
tragedians  had  wrought  had  been  known  to  the  Athe- 
nians. Yet  it  is  the  decadence  of  interest  in  the  subject- 
matter  wliich  is  now  most  pointed  to  as  impairing  the 
permanent  appeal  of  the  poem.  An  epic  which  is  in  the 
third  century  of  its  victorious  power  need  not  fear  any 
displacement.  Its  childhood  myth  of  the  race,  its  crude 
science,  its  antiquated  theology,  may  all  be  granted,  and 
it  is  easy  to  find  in  its  necessary  conventions,  which  be- 
long to  it  as  a  work  of  Umited  art,  something  awkward 
and  irrational,  even  petty  and  ridiculous  to  the  mind's 
eye;  but  the  attack  along  these  Hues  is  successful  only 
when  conducted  against  details ;  the  poem  in  its  whole- 
ness retains  an  overwhelming  power.  It  is  conceived  in 
three  movements;  the  first  is  the  Titan  struggle  of  the 
rebellious  angels;  the  second  is  the  Eden  bower;  the 
third  is  the  creation  of  the  world  with  its  pendant  pano- 
rama of  human  history.  Of  these  three  subjects  the  first 
yields  the  most  majestic  sight  of  that  other  world  of 
Hades  which  the  tragic  imagination  of  man  in  the  great- 

[97] 

/ 


GREAT  WRITERS 
est  poets  has  essayed  to  picture  in  all  times;  the  second 
gives  the  most  charming  rendering  of  that  Bower  of  Bliss 
which  has  also  been  so  often  attempted,  and  the  third 
presents  the  most  nobly  impressive  story  of  the  birth  of 
our  universe  that  is  to  be  found  in  poetry.  It  is  not  neces- 
sary that  the  mind  should  cling  to  the  actuality  of  these 
scenes  and  events  any  more  than  to  the  siege  of  Troy  or 
the  voyage  of  yEneas;  if  they  have  imaginary'  reality  — 
even  if  they  have  only  that  —  it  is  all  the  truth  that 
poetry  seeks  and  is  sufficient  to  interest  men  forever.  If 
Adam  be  as  real  as  DeucaUon,  and  Satan  as  Enceladus 
and  Prometheus,  the  only  question  that  remains  is  with 
respect  to  the  relative  dignity  and  power  of  the  myth  to 
satisfy  the  mind  in  its  effort  to  picture  by  a  symbol  — 
since  it  cannot  know  —  the  secret  of  its  birth,  suffering 
and  destiny.  If  "  Paradise  Lost "  be  looked  at  in  this  way 
as  only  a  hypothesis  of  the  imagination,  it 'yet  remains 
the  loftiest  flight  of  the  mind  of  man  in  that  region  of 
what  is  to  be  only  spiritually  conceived.  It  is  here  that  it 
makes  its  long  and  powerful  appeal  to  masses  of  readers, 
and  remains  a  poem  of  the  Enghsh  nation;  critics  en- 
deavour to  empty  it  of  the  content  of  meaning  of  which 
it  is  full,  and  to  leave  only  the  style  by  which  alone,  they 
will  have  it,  the  poem  survives;  but  my  own  mind,  I 
know  —  and  in  this  I  cannot  be  singular  —  still  holds  to 
the  substance  as  the  true  poem,  indifferent  to  the  fate  of 

[98] 


MILTON 
the  Hebrew  myth,  of  Puritan  theology  or  Darwinian  des- 
cent, or  any  other  of  those  matters  of  contemporaneity 
which  are  forever  tossed  in  men's  minds.  It  is  possible, 
perhaps,  to  trace  the  operation  of  some  of  the  elements 
in  the  poem,  which  are  not  for  an  age,  but  for  all  time. 
One  the  most  salutary  uses  of  great  poetry  is  to  give 
a  scale  of  life.  Wordsworth  was  led  by  the  character  of 
his  genius  to  observe  how  the  continual  presence  of 
grand  natural  features  in  the  landscape  and  the  habitual 
sight  of  the  processes  of  nature's  life  fulfill  this  function 
for  those  who  hve  in  communion  with  them,  and  give  to 
human  life  a  setting  and  perspective.  The  reflection  of 
the  Greeks  that  the  dramatic  representation  of  tragic 
changes  of  fortune  in  the  lives  of  the  great  and  powerful 
imposed  on  the  spectators  a  truer  estimate  of  their  own 
share  of  trial  in  life,  is  an  analogous  thought.  But  the 
soul  grows  in  knowledge  of  itself  not  only  by  these  hum- 
bling influences  of  contrast  with  the  grandeur  of  nature 
and  tragic  calamity;  it  expands  through  all  ideas  that 
raise  its  sense  of  power  however  excited,  and  especially 
that  power  which  is  lodged  in  its  own  being.  "  Paradise 
Lost "  performs  this  service,  with  great  efficiency  and  in 
diverse  ways.  In  what  poem  is  the  infinity  of  the  universe 
so  sensibly  present,  merely  in  the  physical  sphere  ?  It  is 
true  that  Milton  conceives  it  on  the  ancient  Ptolemaic 
system  instead  of  the  Copernican ;  but  there  is  the  sense 

[99] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
of  infinity  in  cillicr,  and  so  unimportant  is  tliis  scientific 
error  in  the  effect  that  the  ordinary  man  has  to  be  told  it 
before  he  finds  it  out,  while  the  localizing  of  heaven  and 
hell  beyond  gives  the  impression  of  unlimited  spacious- 
ness and  the  endless  reach  of  the  world  of  being  quite  in 
the  modem  manner.  In  comparison  with  Shelley's  scien- 
tifically orthodox  representation  of  the  stellar  universe 
in  "  Queen  Mab,"  Milton's  is  more  subUme,  more  true  to 
the  idea  of  infinity,  in  that  it  is  bordered  on  by  the  eter- 
nal world  and  held  witliin  the  compass  of  human  com- 
prehension with  no  loss  to  its  majestic  beauty  as  a  cluster 
of  celestial  orbs  without  number  for  multitude.  What 
poem,  again,  so  succeeds  in  realizing  to  the  mind  super- 
human powxr,  personal  force  raised  to  the  utmost  imag- 
inable height,  not  only  in  the  magnificent  example  of 
Satan,  but  in  his  angelic  peers,  Uriel  and  Gabriel,  even 
in  the  young  angels,  Ithuriel  and  Zephron,  whom  the 
fiend  found  invincible.''  But  the  infinity  which  most 
shines  in  the  poem  is  not  material  or  personal,  not  in  the 
universe  or  the  protagonists  of  the  battle  that  was 
fought  "out  of  space,  out  of  time;"  the  infinity  is 
that  of  man  himself  as  a  soul  in  which  issues  of  eter- 
nity converge,  about  which  play  mysterious  agencies  of 
evil  and  good,  for  which  in  its  unknown  course  celestial 
powers  care;  that  infinity  which  in  the  soul  itself  is  the 
very  ground  of  being  of  the  Christian  religion.  The  soul, 
[100] 


AOLTON 
weaving  this  legend  of  itself  from  its  far  prehistoric 
dawn,  fashioned  this  wonderful  Eden  dream^,  the  scenes 
and  events,  imbedded  in  tradition  and  the  life  of  liistori- 
cal  ages,  long  and  continuously  in  the  human  conscious- 
ness, must  have  deep  affinities  with  the  nature  of  the 
soul  which  in  them  has  incarnated  its  intuitions,  cast  its 
sense  of  spiritual  fact,  pictured  its  beUefs;  in  a  word,  this 
myth  embroidered  on  the  hem  of  the  seamless  garment 
of  truth  is  all  the  memory  the  soul  has  of  its  own  un- 
earthly history.  The  particular  actuality  of  the  links  of 
the  legend,  and  even  the  form  of  the  elements  of  thought 
it  uses,  are  immaterial;  for  the  things  of  the  spirit  can 
only  be  symbolically  shown.  Genesis  and  Geneva  may 
be  alike  disregarded;  science  and  dogma  wholly  apart, 
there  remains  in  the  myth  the  long  enduring  substance 
of  past  experience  and  conviction  stored  in  the  race, 
however  to  be  more  broadly  interpreted  in  the  future. 
If  the  tenet  that  "in  Adam  all  men  sinned"  loses  its 
ancient  power,  it  is  at  least  an  earher  reading  of  that 
solidarity  of  humanity  which  is  one  of  the  master-truths 
of  the  democracy;  if  the  damnation  of  the  angels  is  re- 
pulsive to  humanitarianism,  it  no  less  reflects  the  sense 
of  struggle  with  the  Evil  Principle  which  is  a  fact  of  the 
universal  consciousness  of  mankind,  and  affirms  the 
final  triumph  of  the  Good  which  is  an  element  unshaken 
in  human  faith;  if  the  angelic  guard  round  a  pre-doomed 
[101] 

LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


GREAT  WRITERS 
Paradise  seems  folly  to  the  reason,  it  yet  docs  shadow 
forth  the  strange  double-sense  in  man  of  a  heavenly 
guardianship  and  its  mysterious  failure  to  protect  the 
soul  in  life.  But  few  readers  need  to  consider  the  matter 
so  curiously  as  this.  Every  one,  who  opens  the  poem, finds 
mirrored  there  the  soul  in  its  infinite  and  eternal  nature, 
and  the  mystery  of  its  source  and  destiny  set  forth  with 
an  imaginative  definiteness  of  vision,  as  nowhere  else. 
The  story  is  displayed  with  unexampled  grandeur  in  the 
scenes,  in  the  wasted  gloom  of  hell,  in  the  abyss  of  chaos, 
in  the  freshly  created  universe  of  light,  upon  the  battle- 
plains  of  heaven;  the  characters  are  ennobled  to  the 
height  of  what  is  possible  in  faculty  and  prowess,  in 
form  and  moving  not  inferior  to  the  gods,  eloquent  in 
speech,  majestic  in  action,  each  great  in  his  own  resolve; 
every  element  of  epic  power  and  loveliness,  that  the  prac- 
tice of  elder  poets  had  handled,  is  employed  —  whole 
armies  in  array,  individual  conflict,  the  bower  of  love, 
the  tale  of  creation,  the  panorama  of  liistory,  the  pit,  the 
council,  set  forth  in  all  the  modes  of  oratorj',  dialogue, 
narrative,  apostrophe  and  idyl,  and  all  in  an  unrivalled 
balance  and  harmony  of  the  parts.  The  Hebraic  sol- 
emnity and  directness,  the  Pindaric  loftiness  of  flight, 
yet  so  absorbed  into  Milton's  inspiration  as  to  be  his  own 
and  personal  to  him,  give  to  the  poem  that  quality  that  it 
holds  unshared  with  any  other  epic  —  sublimity;  this  is 
[102] 


MILTON 
the  instinctive  and  also  the  deliberate  judgment  of  all  men 
—  it  is  a  subHme  poem.  If  I  were  to  sum  up  in  a  single 
expression  the  immediate  power  of  "  Paradise  Lost "  over 
men,  I  should  say  that  no  poem  so  dilates  the  mind;  by 
so  doing  it  gives  a  scale  to  life  —  the  scale  of  infinity. 

"Paradise  Lost"  is  not  a  modem  poem;  and  I  have 
dwelt  elsewhere,  perhaps  too  exclusively,  on  the  impor- 
tant ways  in  which  it  departs  from  modem  sympathy; 
like  all  great  works  of  imagination  in  literature  it  looks 
on  human  affairs  with  a  reverted  gaze,  for  such  works 
are  climaxes  of  past  thought  and  passion  in  centuries 
and  civilization.  But  neither  is  it  a  Renaissance  and 
Reformation  poem,  any  more  than  the  "Divine  Com- 
edy" is  a  mediaeval  poem.  There  are  cantos  of  Dante, 
quite  as  theologically  dead  and  more  unintelligible  than 
Milton's  dry  tracts.  Such  elements  of  hardened  matter 
from  which  the  fire  has  gone  are  found  in  all  the  greatest 
compositions.  The  poem  remains  universal,  not  for  an 
age  but  for  all  time,  because  it  is  thus  a  poem  of  the  soul 
and  its  mystery,  and  sets  forth  under  an  intelligible  for- 
mula of  thought  and  history  and  in  images  of  becoming 
grandeur  and  splendour  that  particular  legend  of  the 
soul  which  has  been  the  historical  framework  of  spir- 
itual piety  in  Christian  ages  and  still  appeals  by  count- 
less tendrils  of  memory,  custom  and  aspiration  to  men 
born  Christians;  it  fills  imaginatively  what  is  otherwise 
[103] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
a  void,  "  peoples  tlic  lone  infinite,"  as  no  other  secular 
work  has  done.  It  is  thus  that,  as  I  said,  it  neighbours 
the  Bible  in  men's  thoughts;  and  not  only  does  it  do  this 
by  its  matter,  but  also  by  its  style.  The  Bible  is  the  stan- 
dard of  perfection  in  English  writing;  but  the  same  in- 
fluence which  flows  from  it  upon  the  listening  mind,  and 
is  felt  as  the  unapproached  perfection  of  prose  speech  in 
language  and  cadence  by  the  host  of  the  common  peo- 
ple in  congregations,  also  flows  from  Milton's  verse  in 
the  region  of  poetry;  every  one,  however  unlearned  in 
literature,  feels  that  here  is  a  standard  of  perfection.  It  is 
a  fit  and  crowning  excellence;  but  the  style  is  no  more 
all  of  Milton  than  it  is  all  of  Isaiah  or  St.  John.  The  peo- 
ple cannot  escape  great  style,  as  all  oratory  shows; 
neither  can  they  escape  great  poetry.  The  power  of  the 
highest  is  always  greatest  upon  the  lowest;  it  is  this 
which  makes  a  national  poem  possible;  tliis  sent  Homer 
with  all  Greek  ships,  Virgil  with  all  Roman  eagles,  IMil- 
ton  with  all  English  Bibles  through  the  world. 

"  Paradise  Lost "  is  the  greatest  of  Milton's  works  be- 
cause his  powers  are  there  in  true  balance,  intellect  and 
imagination  in  equal  fellowship,  with  the  lesser  graces  of 
poetry  (such  as  distinguished  his  early  verse)  not  in  neg- 
lect. As  he  grew  rapidly  old,  his  expression  became  bare 
and  austere;  in  "Paradise  Regained"  and  "Samson 
Agonistes"  intellectual  power  seems  to  transcend  and 
[104] 


MILTON 
perhaps  depress  the  imaginative  —  the  balance  is  dis- 
turbed. They  have  the  severity  of  outHne  and  surface 
that  belong  to  the  peak.  They  were  the  work  of  the  last 
years,  when  one  thinks  of  Milton  and  sees  him  in  the 
most  human  way,  comes  near  to  him  as  a  natural  crea- 
ture, an  old  man.  One  youth  there  was  who  came  to  him 
now,  like  the  boys  he  used  to  teach,  and  had  lessons  from 
him  and  talk,  in  return  for  which  he  wrote  at  Milton's 
dictation.  His  daughters  had  left  him;  a  third  wife,  whom 
he  married  late,  took  kindly  care  of  him;  friends  visited 
him.  He  would  sit  outside  the  door  in  the  sun,  wrapped 
in  a  coarse  grey  cloth  coat.  The  undying  portrait  of  him 
is  that  reported  by  the  painter,  Richardson,  from  an 
aged  clergyman  who  called  on  him.  "  He  found  him  in  a 
small  house,  he  thinks  but  one  room  on  a  floor.  In  that, 
up  one  pair  of  stairs,  which  was  hung  with  a  rusty  green, 
he  found  John  Milton  sitting  in  an  elbow-chair,  black 
clothes  and  neat  enough;  pale  but  not  cadaverous;  his 
hands  and  fingers  gouty,  and  with  chalk  stones.  Among 
other  discourse  he  expressed  himself  to  this  purpose, 
'  that,  was  he  free  from  the  pain  this  gave  him,  his  blind- 
ness would  be  tolerable.' "  This  was  the  old  age  appoint- 
ed for  the  fair  youth  of  forty  years  before,  in  whom  the 
beauty  of  the  Renaissance  seemed  to  have  taken  on 
ideal  form,  on  the  eve  of  the  Italian  journey;  to  this  end 
he  had  brought  his  boyhood  passion  for  beauty,  purity 
[105] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
and  perfection  through  a  Hfc  of  intellectual  conflict  to  a 
consummation  that  gave  him  kinship  with  the  sterner 
rather  than  the  softer  brothers  of  his  art,  with  Pindar 
and  iEschylus  and  the  prophets  of  old  rather  than  Euri- 
pides and  the  mild  Italian  genius ;  it  is  hard  to  reconcile 
the  two,  to  find  in  the  old  man  the  youth.  It  is  commonly 
tliought  that  in  the  tragedy  of  "  Samson  "  he  had  his  o^vn 
fortune  in  mind,  and  doubtless  he  drew  sympathetic  in- 
spiration from  his  own  position  in  realizing  that  of  Sam- 
son in  defeat.  But  his  w^orn  spirit  seems  to  have  accepted 
defeat  without  that  despair  of  life  which  in  so  fiery  tem- 
pered a  soul,  so  great  in  faculty,  might  well  be  feared.  It 
may  be  that  his  faith  was  equal  to  that  birth  of  patience, 
which  is  the  crown  of  life  long  lived,  and  the  capacity  for 
which  he  showed  in  promise  in  his  birthday  sonnet  in 
youth  and  in  thought  in  his  sonnet  on  his  blindness.  It  is 
at  least  noticeable  that  the  last  lines  of  "  Samson"  look 
to  fuller  life,  not  death,  and  are  words  of  promise  and 
submission,  of  growth  as  well  as  of  faith - 
"All  w  best,  though  ice  oft  doiibt 

What  the  unsearchable  dispose 

Of  highest  wisdom  brings  about. 

And  ever  best  found  in  the  dose. 

His  servants  He,  with  new  acquist 
Of  true  experience  from  this  great  event. 
With  peace  and  consolation  Iiath  dismissed. 
Arid  calm  of  mind,  all  passion  spent." 

[106] 


MILTON 

In  this  high  mood,  one  hopes,  Milton  took  farewell  of 
the  world  as  of  the  Muse;  he  died  at  almost' sixty-six 
years  of  age,  leaving  to  mankind  a  life  that  has  been  the 
inspiration  of  liberty,  and  these  few  rolls  of  immortal 
verse. 


[107] 


Great  Writers 


IV 


VIRGIL 


Virgil  is  that  poet  whose  verse  has  had  most  power  in  the 
world.  He  was  the  poet  of  Rome,  and  concentrated  in  his 
genius  its  imperial  star;  so  long  as  that  ruled  the  old 
Mediterranean  world,  with  the  great  northwest  and 
eastern  hinterlands,  Virgil  summed  its  glory  for  the  hu- 
man populations  that  fleeted  away  in  that  vast  basin ;  in  a 
world  forever  mightily  changing  his  solitary  pre-emi- 
nence was  one  unchanging  thing,  dimmed  only  as  the 
empire  itself  faded.  His  memory  illumined  the  Dark 
Ages.  He  rose  again  as  the  morning  star  of  the  Latin 
races.  He  penetrated  the  reborn  culture  of  Europe  with 
the  persistency  and  pervasiveness  of  Latinity  itself;  not 
only  was  knowledge  of  his  works  as  wide-spread  as  edu- 
cation, but  his  influence  on  the  artistic  temperament  of 
literatures,  the  style  of  authors  and  even  the  characters 
of  men  in  their  comprehension  of  the  largeness  of  life, 
was  subtle  and  profound,  and  was  the  more  ample  in 
[111] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
proportion  to  the  nearness  of  the  new  nations  to  the  di- 
rect descent  of  civilization.  lie,  more  than  any  other 
poet,  has  been  a  part  of  the  intellectual  life  of  Europe 
alike  by  length  of  sway  and  by  the  multitude  of  minds 
he  touched  in  all  generations;  and,  among  the  Latin 
races,  he  is  still  the  climax  of  their  genius,  for  charm  and 
dignity,  for  art  and  the  profound  substance  of  his  mat- 
ter, and  for  its  serious  inclusiveness  of  human  life.  Of  no 
other  poet  can  it  be  said  that  his  lines  are  a  part  of  the  bi- 
ography of  the  great,  of  emperors  like  Augustus  and 
Hadrian,  of  fathers  Uke  Jerome  and  xlugustine,  of 
preachers  like  Savonarola,  churchmen  hke  Fenelon, 
statesmen  like  Pitt  and  Burke;  and  among  the  host  of 
humble  scholars,  of  schoolmasters,  the  power  he  has 
held  in  their  bosoms  is  as  remarkable  for  its  personal 
intimacy  as  for  its  universal  embrace.  No  fame  so  ma- 
jestic has  been  cherished  with  a  love  so  tender.  Virgil 
thus  blends  in  a  marvellous  manner  the  authority  of  a 
classic  with  the  direct  appeal  to  life. 

It  belongs  to  the  sense  of  familiar  companionship 
which  Virgil's  verse  exliales  that  some  shadows  of  his 
personality  survive,  slight  but  sufficient  for  memory  and 
affection.  He  was  the  son  of  a  small  farmer,  in  the  prov- 
ince of  North  Italy,  of  whom  no  more  is  known  than  that 
he  wished  to  give  his  cliild  the  best  education  then  to  be 
had.  We  first  see  him,  who  was  to  be  so  great  a  poet,  as 
[112] 


VIRGIL 
the  slender  tall  schoolboy  at  Cremona  and  Milan,  with 
the  rusticity  of  manner  which  he  never  laid  a"side.  He 
studied  also  at  Rome,  in  his  youth,  and  found  patrician 
friends  among  his  mates.  He  made  his  way  later  with 
men  of  great  affairs,  and  notwithstanding  the  shyness  of 
liis  heart  and  the  awkwardness  of  his  manners  they 
found  something  to  prize  in  him  by  some  charm  the 
Muses  shed,  loved  him,  petted  and  praised  him,  and  gave 
him  a  fortune,  a  house  at  Rome,  near  Maecenas'  garden, 
which  he  seldom  used,  and  two  country  homes  at  Na- 
ples and  Nola,  where  he  loved  to  live  in  the  soft  Cam- 
panian  air;  there,  except  for  sojourns  in  Sicily  and  pleas- 
ant travel  in  the  Greek  cities  and  along  the  islands,  he 
passed  those  meditative  years  of  privacy  in  which  his 
self-distrustful  and  long-brooding  genius  slowly  matured 
its  eternal  work;  there,  too,  as  he  desired,  at  Naples,  over 
by  the  hill  of  Posilippo,  his  ashes  were  laid  to  rest  in  that 
pleasant  city's  soil,  which  still  keeps  the  tradition  of  his 
tomb.  He  was  happy  in  the  protecting  affection  of  his 
friends,  and  also  in  the  honour  of  the  world  which  rose 
to  him  as  to  Augustus  when  he  entered  the  theatre,  and 
in  the  power  of  lifelong  labour  in  his  art  undiminished 
by  an  hour  wasted  on  inferior  things.  In  all  outward 
ways  his  life  was  the  most  fortunate  recorded  in  litera- 
ture ;  and  it  is  good  to  know  that  the  world  was  gentle  to 
one  of  those  delicate  spirits  who,    usually  with   how 

[113] 


c;reat  writers 

difTcrcnt  a  fate,  I)ring  it  gifts  from  eternity.  In  the  mem- 
ory of  Virgil  tlicre  is  no  bitterness  of  regret  for  the 
words  of  unkindness  or  the  blows  of  adversity;  he  lived 
peacefully  and  in  the  habitual  enjoyment  of  some  of  the 
fairest  gifts  of  life. 

Nowhere  so  much  as  in  those  works  which  seem  most 
independent  of  the  power  of  time,  which  escape  from 
their  own  age,  their  native  country  and  race,  and  enter 
upon  a  cycle  of  memory  so  vast  that  they  are  fitly  named 
the  stars  of  the  intellectual  firmament,  is  it  needful  to  de- 
fine their  moment,  to  understand  the  nest  of  their  con- 
ception, the  law  of  their  creation,  the  nature  of  their  first 
appeal  to  men,  in  a  word  their  contemporaneity.  The 
moment  of  Virgil  is  declared  plainly  in  the  "  Eclogues.'* 
They  are  little  poems,  the  laboured  trifles  of  his  'pren- 
tice hand;  but  in  them,  like  the  oak  in  the  acorn  there 
is  in  miniature  all  Virgil ;  both  the  man  and  his  work  are 
there  like  a  preconception.  The  teachableness  of  Virgil  is 
his  prime  character,  and  shines  in  Iiis  youth.  He  woke  to 
the  past  as  simply  as  a  child  opens  its  eyes  to  the  dancing 
sunlight  of  the  world,  and  he  took  it  in  directly  as  some- 
thing belonging  to  him.  He  made  speed  to  enter  on  his 
inheritance;  and  for  him  this  heritage  in  its  special  form 
was  the  glory  of  Greek  literature.  The  imaginative  in- 
terpretation of  the  world  stored  in  a  thousand  years  of 
Greek  poetry  was  the  food  of  his  heart.  Thus  it  came 
[11-1] 


VIRGIL 

about  that  he  did  not  begin  to  write  in  a  way  discovered 
and  worked  out  merely  by  himself,  but  imitated,  as  it  is 
said,  Theocritus  the  Syracusan,  the  chief  Greek  master 
of  pastoral  verse.  He  could  not  have  had  better  fortune. 
For  a  youth  unacquainted  with  experience  the  artificial 
mode  of  life  which  the  pastoral  presents  as  its  frame- 
work of  incident  and  song  is  itself  favourable,  since  its 
requirements  of  accurate  representation  of  reality  are 
less  stringent;  and,  especially,  its  small  scale  enforces  at- 
tention to  detail  and  encourages  perfection  of  phrase, 
line  and  image  in  the  workmansliip  and  condensation  in 
the  matter,  while  its  variety  of  description,  dialogue  and 
inserted  song  and  its  blend  of  lyric  and  dramatic  moods 
give  scope  to  a  mind  experimenting  as  it  learns.  It  is  for 
this  reason  that  so  many  of  the  world's  great  poets  in 
their  youth  have  tried  their  wings  in  these  numbers, 
brief,  composite,  academic,  so  well  fitted  for  the  exer- 
cise of  growing  talents,  already  touched  with  scholar- 
ship, in  a  world  not  too  real  to  be  lightly  held  nor  so 
fantastic  as  to  preclude  truth  of  feeling.  Virgil  derived 
the  proper  good  from  the  imitation  of  a  great  master  by 
developing  through  it  his  native  power.  Theocritus  re- 
mained the  master-singer  of  the  idyl ;  but  before  the  dif- 
ferent genius  of  Virgil  passed  on  to  its  own  toils,  he  had 
left  the  sweetness  of  his  youth  here  in  the  pastoral  like  a 
perfume  forever. 

[115] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
The  poetic  life  of  Virf^il,  however,  in  these  years  was 
more  profound  than  this,  lie  was  not  merely  training  his 
genius  in  certain  external  modes  of  expression;  he  was 
unfolding  his  soul.  Form  was  the  Greek  gift  to  Virgil; 
not  only  that  form  which  exists  in  the  outer  structure  of 
line  and  melody  or  within  the  verse  in  its  logic  of  emo- 
tion and  event,  but  form  which  has  power  to  cast  the 
mind  itself  in  predetermined  lines  of  feeling  and  action, 
of  taste,  of  choice,  of  temperament,  and  finds  utterance 
in  that  beauty  of  the  soul  which  is  precedent  to  all 
verse.  Form  in  its  reUgious  moods  has  this  power  to 
possess  and  shape  the  souls  of  men,  as  is  familiarly 
seen;  and  so  artistic  form,  aUve  and  bodied  iu  the  lovely 
and  ancient  Greek  tradition,  seized  Virgil  in  the  spirit 
and  fashioned  him;  he  was  its  child  a:s  the  novice  is  the 
spiritual  son  of  St.  Francis.  The  opposition  between 
Theocritus  and  Virgil  Ues  in  this :  in  Theocritus,  life 
puts  on  the  forms  of  art ;  in  Virgil  art  puts  on  the  forms 
of  life.  In  the  Syracusan  idyls  there  is  objective  beauty 
—  pictures  idealized  and  detached  from  life;  in  the 
Mantuan  "  Eclogues  "  one  feels  rather  the  presence  of  a 
beautiful  soul  to  which  art  has  given  the  gift  of  tongues 
to  speak  to  all  men.  This  deep  intimate  compelling 
mastery  of  the  Greek  spirit  over  all  that  was  artistic  in 
Virgil  shaped  him  almost  in  his  essential  being;  he  was 
Hellcnized  as  by  a  second  birth.  It  was  characteristic 
[IIG] 


VIRGIL 
of  him  to  yield  to  the  will  of  life,  and  he  yielded  happily 
to  the  Greek  forms  of  imagination,  for  he*  found  in 
this  obedience  that  yoke  in  which  alone  everlasting 
freedoms  lie  and  the  power  of  a  free  soul ;  it  released 
his  personality  as  if  by  some  divine  and  creative  touch. 
Tliis  presence  of  Virgil  in  his  verse  is  elementary.  He 
was  a  lover,  and  through  love  disengaged  from  life  its 
moment  of  beauty,  of  sentiment,  of  millennial  hope;  but 
this  beauty,  sentiment  and  hope  are  seen  under  that 
almost  atmospheric  charm  which  has  coined  for  itself 
the  name  Virgilian  and  is  breathed  from  himself.  It  is 
not  for  what  these  eclogues  contain  of  Theocritus  that 
they  have  been  dear  to  the  poets  of  all  lands,  any  more 
than  it  is  for  what  the  youthful  lines  of  Spenser  and  Mil- 
ton contain  of  these  eclogues  that  the  English  breathings 
of  the  pastoral  are  dear;  it  is  because  they  express  with 
great  purity  and  sweetness  the  genius  of  Virgil  in  its 
tender  age. 

If  any  one  finds  in  the  eclogues  only  the  echo  of  Theo- 
critus, he  is  wide  of  the  mark;  his  ear  is  not  set  to  the 
ringing  of  the  master-melody  in  their  song.  The  poets 
used  the  same  instrument,  and  the  younger  learned  its 
use  from  the  elder;  but  each  employed  it  with  a  differ- 
ence, and  this  difference  is  a  gulf  of  ages  between 
them  and  an  opposition  in  the  spring  and  impulse  of 
poetry.  Art  is  not  life,  but  is  evoked  from  life.  Theo- 
[117] 


CHEAT  WHITKUS 
critus  held  the  mirror  to  hfe,  but  its  image  in  his  verse 
though  more  beautiful  is  still  a  thing  of  the  external 
world ;  he  stands  outside  what  he  depicts  and  renders  it 
for  its  own  sake.  Virgil  projected  himself  into  life,  and  is 
the  centre  of  the  world  he  expresses;  he  uses  it  to  illus- 
trate his  own  personality,  to  body  forth  his  own  various 
loves  of  beauty,  nature,  sentiment,  romance,  aspiration, 
to  clothe  with  the  forms  of  life  that  soul  which  art  had 
shaped  in  him.  He  was  still,  though  thirty,  only  a  half- 
boyish  lover  of  books  and  nature  and  a  few  friends,  and 
the  world  he  lived  in  was  but  little  known  to  him;  the 
eclogues  with  the  personality  of  autobiography  disclose 
this  young  scholar  in  his  world.  Virgil's  world,  too,  like 
the  temperamental  drift  of  his  art,  is  different  from  that 
of  Theocritus;  it  is  one  more  diversified,  more  actual  and 
contemporaneous  even;  it  is  a  Roman,  Italian,  procon- 
sular world.  He  thinks  of  Actium  and  Parthia  as  we 
to-day  think  of  Santiago  and  the  Philippines.  His  land- 
scape has  the  face  and  profile  of  familiar  haunts;  his 
shepherds  have  the  features  of  his  own  rustics;  his  in- 
terests are  his  own  local  and  temporal  affairs.  The  pas- 
toral Arcadia  is  a  convention  by  means  of  which  the  en- 
cumbrances of  time  and  place  and  persons  and  much 
matter  of  fact  are  gotten  rid  of;  but  under  its  clear  veil 
which  softens  the  unimportant,  stand  undisguised  the 
men  and  events,  the  sentiment,  the  friendships,  the 
[118] 


VIRGIL 
scenes,  the  recreations,  all  the  loves  of  the  young  poet  from 
the  humblest  and  tenderest  up  to  the  hope  of  all  the  world 
which  he  in  those  first  years  sounded  for  eternal  memory 
as  none  before  or  since  has  sung  the  strain.  Such  is  the 
Roman  substance,  personal,  Italian,  imperial,  of  it  all, 
notwithstanding  the  superficial  artifice  of  the  poetic  form. 
Roman,  too,  was  the  seriousness  of  the  young  poet  in 
his  art.  He  and  his  fellow  poets  of  the  age  were  in  litera- 
ture provincials  whose  metropolis  was  Greek  letters. 
They  set  themselves  to  the  patriotic  task  of  bringing  the 
Greek  muses  to  Latium  where  Aeneas  had  brought  the 
Trojan  gods,  and  creating  in  Latin  something  as  near 
the  Greek  poetry  as  they  could  accomplish,  and  by  very 
obviously,  often  direct,  imitative  means.  They  were 
zealous  in  the  work ;  all  were  serious  in  it,  however  light 
the  touch  or  the  topic  they  strove  to  transplant  to  their 
own  language  and  world.  Virgil  was  such  a  provincial, 
though  Greek  art  was  itself  refined  in  passing  through 
his  temperament;  and  he  had  such  seriousness  of  mind. 
To  compare  great  things  with  small,  he  was  not  unlike 
the  young  Longfellow  in  America  who  was  a\'id  of  all 
the  literatures  of  Europe  and  assimilated  the  poetic  tra- 
dition of  the  thousand  years  preceding  his  birth,  and  who 
also  strove  with  like  seriousness  to  compass  something 
like  that  in  his  own  new  land;  and  hke  Virgil,  he  too,  in 
after  fife  created  for  liis  country  its  native  romance  and 
[119] 


GUEAT  VVHITEHS 
primitive  sentiment,  giving  to  its  desert  nakedness  an 
ascribed  and  imputed  poetry.  The  Roman  moment, 
also,  in  the  largest  way,  was  not  unlike  our  own.  \'ir- 
gil  was  bom  in  a  dawning  age;  for  him,  as  for  us,  life  had 
been  long  lived  in  the  world,  there  was  antiquity,  the 
thousand  years  of  literature,  and  vanishing  religions; 
Egypt  was,  perhaps,  even  more  a  monument  of  the  Un- 
known Death  than  to-day;  but  with  the  spread  of  the 
power  of  Rome,  which  was  then  what  the  spread  of  lib- 
erty now  is,  a  new  age  was  at  hand.  Law  and  peace, 
which  were  the  other  names  of  Rome,  had  the  world  in 
their  grasp,  and  were  conquering  far  outward  along  its 
dark  barbaric  edges  even  to  Britain  "sundered  once 
from  all  the  human  race."  It  was  then  that  Virjril,  "in 
the  foremost  files  of  time, "  sang  in  his  youth  that  ec- 
logue, the  "  Pollio  "  which  is  the  greatest  hymn  of  anti- 
quity, if  not  of  all  time,  and  won  for  himself,  though  a 
pagan,  a  place  among  the  saints  of  the  Church : 

Magnus  ah  iniegro  saeclorum  nascitur  ordo. 

The  line  has  the  swell  of  the  "  Gloria."  Thus  early,  thus 
fundamental  by  virtue  of  its  earliness,  arose  in  him  and 
mingled  with  his  genius  that  temperament  of  world-hope, 
not  the  diminutive  Arcadian  dream  of  a  valley  or  distant 
islands  of  the  blessed,  but  world-hope  mighty  as  the 
world,  on  the  great  scale  of  universal  sympathy  for  man- 
[120] 


VIRGIL 
kind,  which  was  one  of  the  authentic  signs  of  a  new  time. 
It  was  the  secular  hour  of  the  founding  of  the  Empire;  it 
was  the  spiritual  hour  of  the  birth  of  Christ;  and  its 
presence  was  in  the  young  poet's  heart.  A  mighty  voice, 
too,  had  before  now  been  heard  in  Rome,  the  voice  of 
one  crying  in  the  wilderness  of  the  dethroned  gods,  a 
man  so  great  that  he  could  endure  the  longest  probation 
of  any  of  the  poets  of  mankind  and  wait  nineteen  cen- 
turies for  the  fullness  of  his  fame  —  Lucretius.  Virgil 
heard  the  voice,  and  stored  it  in  his  heart,  and  meditated 
upon  it;  but  the  time  was  not  yet  come.  It  was  the  eve  of 
a  great  past,  the  dawn  of  a  great  future ;  and  the  further 
one  penetrates  the  verse,  the  more  clearly  stands  out  this 
youthful  figure  with  the  radiance  of  the  world's  new 
morning  in  his  face. 

The  "  Eclogues,"  obeying  the  law  of  all  beautiful 
things,  have  gathered  beauty  from  the  lapse  of  time. 
Some  light  streams  back  upon  them  from  the  later  glory 
of  Virgil,  and  they  have  that  increase  of  charm  which 
belongs  to  things  that  have  been  long  loved;  the  lines, 
too,  like  shells,  are  full  of  vocal  memories.  For  one  who 
knows  them  well  and  knows  the  poets,  they  are  a  nest  of 
the  singing  birds  of  all  lands ;  as  he  reads,  voices  of  Italy, 
France  and  England  blend  with  the  familiar  lines,  and  a 
choiring  vision  rises  before  him  of  the  world's  poets  in 
their  youth  framing  their  lips  to  the  smooth-sliding  syl- 
[121] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
lablcs;  for  the  eclogues  have  been  deeply  cherished.  They 
are  loved  chiefly,  however,  because  the  young  \'irgil  is 
seen  in  them,  as  in  the  palaestra  of  his  art  before  he  had 
put  on  his  singing-robes,  with  that  sweet  teachableness, 
that  yielding  and  hospitable  mind,  out  of  which  was  to 
come,  to  bless  him  and  the  world,  the  wide  receptivity  of 
his  spirit,  the  rich  assimilation,  the  accumulated  power 
of  imagination  in  the  race,  already  held  in  the  grasp  of 
his  genius  like  Ithuriel's  spear.  Rome  and  Athens,  the 
light  and  majesty  of  the  world,  were  married  in  his 
blood;  and  though  he  bore  as  yet  only  the  rustic  reed, 
here  in  the  adolescence  of  genius  was  the  form  of  him 
who  was  to  hand  down  by  descent  the  antique  vigour  to 
the  modem  world.  Virgil  became  the  great  reconciler  in 
liis  own  inherited  world,  the  great  mediator  between  an- 
tiquity and  Christendom;  he  maintained  in  poetry, 
equally  with  Plato  in  philosophy,  the  unbroken  contin- 
uity of  the  human  spirit;  but  before  entering  on  these 
great  offices  and  as  preliminary  to  them  he  was  first  of  all 
and  by  instinct  a  great  lover  —  a  greater  lover  than 
Dante  —  and  here  in  the  first  friendly  affections  of  the 
senses  melting  with  the  w^orld,  of  the  heart  blending  with 
other  lives,  of  the  mind  breatliing  the  universal  hope  of 
all,  is  this  lover  in  the  bud  —  he,  who  was  to  be  the 
greatest  lover  in  all  the  world  of  all  things  beautiful, 
strong,  tender,  pitiful,  sad,  and  fated. 
[122] 


VIRGIL 
There  was  another  scope,  a  different  fibre  in  the 
*'  Georgics,"  the  fruit  of  his  seven  years'  toil  in  early 
manhood.  EQs  genius  had  been  powerfully  condensed; 
the  matter  of  the  song  was  as  firmly  organized  as  it  was 
richly  diversified ;  the  whole,  scarcely  two  thousand  lines 
in  all,  was  a  great  single  poem.  The  sense  of  nationality, 
no  longer  diffused  and  dispersed,  bums  at  the  centre  as 
its  nucleus  and  feeding  flame.  The  work,  though  small 
in  scale  is  monumental  in  effect;  it  bears  the  Roman 
birthmark  in  its  practical  purpose  to  share  in  the  res- 
toration of  the  agricultural  life,  and  in  the  author's  dedi- 
cation of  his  powers  to  public  spirit.  It  was  characteris- 
tic of  Virgil  to  require  reality  in  his  subject-matter,  and  a 
present  hour;  contemporaneousness  presided  in  the  in- 
ception and  purpose  of  all  he  did ;  however  far  he  might 
range,  he  brought  all  home  to  amplify  that  moment  of 
Rome  in  which  he  lived.  More  than  any  other  of  the 
poets  of  mankind  he  used  the  poetic  art  to  idealize,  to 
exalt  and  to  enrich  the  nation's  consciousness;  and, 
through  singleness  of  mind  and  comprehensiveness  of 
effort,  he  became  the  most  national  of  all  poets.  As  the 
world  had  been  given  to  Rome  to  rule,  Rome  had  been 
given  to  him  to  be  the  Empire  of  his  song ;  this  was  his 
destiny.  His  genius  did  not  expand  suddenly  and  at  once 
to  so  vast  a  sphere;  but  as  is  the  case  with  all  men  who 
accumulate  greatness  as  if  by  a  process  of  nature,  hum- 
[123] 


(;hi:at  writers 

bier  impulses  and  lesser  tasks  conducted  him  upon  his 
way.  He  would  tell  the  story  of  Italy  —  that  was  the 
phase  under  which  Rome  first  appealed  to  him.  It  was  as 
if  some  one  of  our  own  poets  had  chosen  to  write  an 
idyl  of  the  old  free  life  of  New  England,  in  the  days  be- 
fore national  unity  and  American  destiny  had  come  to 
fullness  in  his  heart.  With  unerring  instinct,  in  choosing 
his  theme,  he  struck  straight  at  the  fundamental  Roman 
interest,  the  land,  the  soil;  but  not  yet  imperializing,  he 
seized  tliis  interest  not  in  its  foreign  form  of  land-hunger 
which  is  the  impulse  of  all  empire,  but  in  its  primitive 
form  of  the  home-domain,  "the  mighty  mother  of  men 
and  fruits, "  that  Italy  which  was  Rome's  birthright.  He 
thought  of  the  land,  too,  not  as  our  nature-poets  do  in 
modem  days  as  a  description  of  contour  and  colour  and 
changes  of  the  weather,  the  magic  of  the  senses,  but 
primitively  as  the  dwelhng  place  of  the  race  and  the  ele- 
ment of  its  labours.  Toil ;  that,  too,  was  a  Roman  idea, 
and  he  yoked  it  with  the  land  in  a  Roman  way;  for 
he  saw  human  hfe  on  the  soil  as  an  arduous  and  un- 
remitting warfare  with  the  stubborn  obduracy  of  na- 
ture, who  being  subdued,  nevertheless,  became  benefi- 
cent, rejoicing  in  her  captivity,  and  rewarded  her 
conqueror  with  the  harvest  of  the  earth  and  its  loveli- 
ness, with  the  external  blessings  of  the  gods  and  with 
moral  boons  of  inward  excellence  stored  in  the  char- 
[124] 


VIRGIL 
acters  of  men  by  this  discipline  of  the  perennial  task 
of  life. 

The  "  Georgics  "  is  the  story  of  this  perennial  task.  In 
its  original  and  parent  form  no  more  than  an  almanac,  a 
manual  of  the  planting  of  crops,  the  raising  of  cattle  and 
the  tending  of  bees,  it  grew  in  Virgil's  mind  to  be  a  poem 
of  the  sacred  year.  Virgil  was  by  instinct  and  tempera- 
ment a  ritualist.  The  regularity  inherent  in  times  and 
seasons  and  all  ceremonial,  the  solemnity  belonging  to 
all  rites,  the  presence  of  the  abstract  and  hidden  in 
their  significance,  were  things  profoundly  Roman  and 
responded  to  what  was  by  race  deeply  implanted  in  his 
nature.  The  round  of  the  seasons  in  their  connection 
with  agricultural  life  was  in  his  eyes  a  ritual  of  the  year, 
the  presence  and  action  of  a  natural  religion.  The  de- 
pendence of  man  on  nature  always  plays  a  great  part  in 
religious  life;  even  now  when  that  dependence  is  less 
definitely  felt  than  in  primitive  times  it  is  at  birth,  mar- 
riage and  death,  the  great  moments  of  nature,  that  re- 
ligion has  its  common  and  vital  impact  on  the  general 
life;  and  in  the  primitive  conditions,  set  forth  in  this 
poem,  nature  might  seem  herself  to  appoint  the  sacred 
days  of  the  gods  both  for  prayer  and  for  thanksgiving,  to 
order  the  festivals  in  their  course  and  to  prescribe  the  pe- 
culiar service  for  the  hour,  month  after  month,  in  an- 
nual revolution.  The  needs  of  each  season  and  the  pur- 
[125] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
suits  appropriate  to  it  determined  the  active  (Jutics  of 
man,  and  these  drew  after  them  the  due  religious  prac- 
tices consecrated  by  use  and  wont;  and,  in  the  issue  of  all, 
the  blessings  of  the  divine  gods  crowned  the  labour  with 
a  present  reward.  Natural  piety  could  not  have  a  simp- 
ler being  than  this.  The  mystery  of  the  world  which  en- 
velopes all  life-processes  on  the  earth  has  always  over- 
hung the  out-of-doors  people  with  some  grandeur  in  the 
elements,  with  stars  and  winds  and  waves;  in  living  near 
to  nature,  they  seem,  by  virtue  of  being  lost  and  unpro- 
tected there,  to  reach  out  to  the  unknown  in  habitual 
ways.  Virgil  felt  tliis  mystery  after  a  different  fashion; 
he  knew  it  in  the  forms  of  old  mythology  that  Greek  im- 
agination had  put  on  in  the  divine  presence,  and  also  in 
the  forms  of  new  science  that  Greek  intellect  had  put 
forth  in  attempting  a  rational  conception  of  nature  as  a 
thing  subject  to  human  knowledge.  He  was  not  dis- 
turbed by  this  double  possession  of  imagination  and 
rational  intuition ;  that  teachable,  that  yielding  and  hos- 
pitable mind,  by  its  own  nature  made  him  in  his  self- 
expression  a  representative  poet;  he  gave  out  life  in  its 
wholeness.  This  sacred  year,  with  its  ritual  of  work  and 
and  worship,  drew  his  eyes  upon  it,  as  a  thing  of  out- 
ward beauty,  and  first  gave  up  to  his  gaze,  first  of  men, 
that  enveloping  charm  of  the  land  and  its  life  which  is 
now  the  world's  thought  of  Italy;  this  year,  too,  with  its 
[  126  ] 


VIRGIL 

antique  usages,  as  old,  perhaps,  as  the  tilled  soil  itself, 
recurring  in  their  seasons  as  the  sun  rose  in  the  zodiac, 
engaged  his  affections  by  which  he  was  bound  to  all 
things  of  reverence,  age  and  piety,  and  none  more  than 
he  realized  in  his  heart  both  their  divine  and  human  ap- 
peal; and,  with  all  this,  awoke,  too,  the  philosophic  mind, 
fed  from  later  fountains,  and  he  flung  round  this  ancient 
Italy,  humanized  by  long  Hfe  upon  its  soil,  that  large 
horizon  of  the  intellect,  in  which  his  own  time  was  be- 
ginning to  live. 

In  such  ways  as  these  the  poem  which  was  begun  as  a 
manual  of  the  farm's  task-work  came  from  Virgil's 
hands  so  touched  with  visible  beauty,  old  religious  asso- 
ciation, the  mythology  and  science  of  the  Mediterranean 
world  and  his  own  loves  for  all  these,  that  it  was,  without 
fiction,  an  incarnate  Italy.  He  had  embodied  in  his  verse 
the  land  itself  with  all  its  loveliness,  then  as  it  is  to-day,  a 
land  long  lived  in,  with  history,  legend  and  ruins  of  a 
storied  past  reaching  back  into  the  unknown  ages;  he 
had  set  forth  its  characteristic  life,  the  human  product  of 
the  soil,  as  a  thing  so  sharing  in  the  simplicities  of  na- 
ture and  what  is  divinely  primitive  as  to  make  it  seem 
the  eternal  model  of  what  the  life  of  man  on  earth  should 
be,  under  the  dispensation  of  labour,  yet  enveloped  in 
the  kindly  agencies  of  sun  and  rain,  springtide  and 
summer  heat  and  mellowing  falls,  the  birth  and  rebirth 
[127] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
of  all  things  in  the  revolution  of  the  year  —  a  life  which 
was  itself  religion,  a  round  of  duty,  prayer  and  j)raise; 
and  he  had  evoked  from  this  land  and  the  life  there  lived 
in  the  plains  and  uplands  that  abstract  Italy,  the  eldest 
of  the  modem  nations,  in  unveiling  whom  he  may  al- 
most be  said  to  have  created  the  mother-land.  It  is  the 
same  Italy,  then  and  now;  the  stream  of  Italian  patriot- 
ism still  mounts  to  the  hymn  of  the  second  Georgic  as  its 
fountainhead.  There  Italy  is  first  seen  clothed  with 
the  divinity  that  a  land  identified  with  a  race  and  a  re- 
nown takes  on  in  the  hearts  of  its  children.  Virgil  seized 
the  fact  in  its  moment,  with  that  revelation  of  the  actual 
which  the  liighcst  poetry  exists  to  achieve.  He  sees  Italy 
as  the  centre  of  the  world,  with  other  lands  antique  or 
barbarous  lying  on  the  sea  about  and  beyond  her,  each 
with  its  just  distance  and  colouring  and  place  in  the 
Mediterranean  world,  which  is  her  sphere,  but  subject 
and  tributary  to  her  unenvious  supremacy  in  fertility  and 
men  and  fame.  The  miracle  is  the  perfection  with  which 
Virgil  expresses  this  security  in  happiness,  beauty  and 
power,  this  unclouded  felicity  of  fortune,  this  ordered 
peace,  while  distant  clouds  of  war  and  menace  whirl  only 
on  the  far  confines  of  the  scene. 

He  had  prepared  himself  with  wonderful  thoroughness 
for  the  work;  a  broad  base  of  scholarship  lies  under  it, 
and  for  the  didactic  substance  he  had  brought  all  Greek 
[128] 


VIRGIL 
and  Roman  knowledge,  and  something  even  from  Car- 
thage, to  contribute  to  its  truth,  precision  and  fuhiess;  but 
it  was  rather  by  his  cultural  knowledge,  which  he  used 
in  heightening  and  expanding  the  theme  to  its  true  pro- 
portions, that  he  regenerated  and  transformed  the  matter 
of  the  verse  and  made  the  rural  scene  into  the  glory 
of  Italy.  The  wealth  of  this  preparation,  and  his  seven 
years'  toil,  may  seem  disproportionate  to  the  result  in  a 
poem  so  brief,  but  only  to  those  who  do  not  know  that, 
the  scale  of  the  matter  being  allowed  for,  the  power  of  a 
poem  is  in  inverse  proportion  to  its  length.  He  used  for 
his  artistic  method  a  selective,  partial  description,  sub- 
ordinating individuality  and  detail  to  social  and  general 
presentation,  and  he  employed  episode,  suggestion  and 
the  emphasis  that  lies  in  enthusiasm  to  enlarge  the 
theme  and  quahfy  it  with  greatness;  in  particular,  he 
intended  no  exhaustion  of  the  subject  but  only  of  the 
feehng  of  the  subject,  which  is  the  method  of  great 
poetry,  and  hence  come  the  rapidity,  the  variety,  the 
completeness  of  impression  which  are  the  most  obvious 
traits  of  the  changeful  lines.  The  "  Georgics,"  most  of  all, 
reveals  the  master  of  the  poetic  art;  and  in  a  work  some- 
what limited  by  its  choice  of  one  though  a  great  and  en- 
during phase  of  human  life  and  also  by  its  national  in- 
spiration and  its  attachment  to  a  particular  social  mo- 
ment, the  mind  has  leisure  to  notice  the  more  its  artistic 
[129] 


GREAT  WIUTEUS 
modes,  the  choice  and  ordering  of  the  material,  the  col- 
ours of  rhetoric,  the  edge  and  immobiUty  of  style  ever 
fresh  and  everlasting  as  sculpture,  the  Avealth  of  mo- 
saic, the  pictorial, sententious  and  eclectic  compositeness, 
the  elaboration  of  the  poem's  beauty  in  the  whole  and  in 
detail.  It  is  full  of  a  poet's  choices;  and,  though  popular 
with  the  cultivated  class  to  which  it  was  addressed,  is 
essentially  a  poet's  poem.  True  to  himself,  the  stuff  which 
Virgil  worked  in  was  his  own  nature;  out  of  his  heart 
brooding  on  the  beauty  of  the  visible  world  about  liim, 
on  the  picture  of  its  human  labours  and  the  imperial 
care  conserving  all  these  things  in  happy  and  lasting 
peace,  came  the  vision  shaped  and  coloured  and  ideal- 
ized by  his  sympathies  with  man's  life,  his  affections  for 
the  things  of  old  time,  his  hopes  in  the  present.  The 
"  Georgics  "  in  a  land  of  patriots  and  poets  is  still  the 
unrivalled  monument  of  the  first  poet-lover  of  Italy. 

The  "Aeneid,"  Virgil's  last  and  greatest  work,  is  a 
world-poem.  It  is  one  of  that  splendid  cluster  of  world- 
poems,  which  by  the  fewness  of  their  number,  the  sing- 
leness of  their  glory,  and  the  great  intervals  of  time  that 
separate  them,  have,  of  all  man's  works  most  infinitude; 
though  time  attacks  them,  they  survive  like  the  p}Ta- 
mids ;  they  are  man's  Bibles  on  the  side  that  he  turns  to 
the  human,  like  the  Scriptures  on  the  side  that  he  turns 
to  the  divine.  The  distinctive  feature  of  the  "  Aeneid  "  is 
[130] 


VIRGIL 
the  arc  of  time  it  covers,  the  burden  of  time  it  supports. 
After  that  song  of  Italy,  of  the  land  and  the  life,  the  gen- 
ius of  Virgil  struck  a  deeper  compass  of  reality  and 
seized  the  theme  at  its  heart.  "  Utter  my  toiUng  power, " 
said  Rome.  The  tale  of  the  wanderings  of  Aeneas  and 
how  he  brought  the  Trojan  gods  to  Latium  is  only  the 
fable ;  over  and  beyond  all  the  character  and  event  which 
it  contains,  and  including  these  like  an  atmosphere,  it  is 
a  symbol  of  the  massive  labour  of  the  seven  centuries 
that  had  for  their  crown  and  climax  the  pacified  Au- 
gustan world. 

Tantae  molis  erat  Romanam  condere  gentem. 

This  massive  labour,  this  toiling  power,  is  the  theme.  It 
is  not  the  Homeric  world ;  no  ten  years'  foray,  brilliant 
with  Greek  personality,  in  the  dawn  of  history;  no  pas- 
sionate boy,  though  the  most  splendid  of  all  Alexanders, 
great  in  his  sulking  wrath,  his  comrade-love  and  his 
battle-glory;  no  chieftains  parleying  in  the  council  and 
warriors  rushing  in  the  field ;  not  these.  It  is  the  Virgilian 
world  —  Rome  at  the  summit  of  her  Empire,  rising  from 
those  seven  centuries  of  interminable  strain.  Rome  in 
the  verse  is  its  creative  impulse,  and  governs  the  poem 
in  its  whole  and  in  its  parts.  The  sense  of  past  time, 
too,  always  so  strong  in  Virgil,  is  never  relaxed.  The 
"Aeneid  "  is  the  book  of  an  old  world. 
[131] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
Aeneas  is,  in  his  character,  Rome  concentrated  —  a 
man  set  against  the  world;  and  in  him,  too,  is  that  per- 
spective of  the  past.  He  has  outhved  his  personal  life; 
his  city  is  in  ashes,  his  wife  is  dead;  there  remains  noth- 
ing for  himself,  only  to  live  for  others,  to  obey  the  will  of 
the  gods,  devotion  to  a  public  end.  He  is  characterized 
by  patience,  in  which  his  piety  is  absorbed  —  that 
patience  which  ahke  to  the  Pagan  and  the  Christian 
world,  to  the  Oriental  and  the  Occidental  mind,  is 
the  greatest  virtue  of  man,  and  was  the  state  virtue  of 
Rome;  to  endure,  however  distant  the  goal,  however 
frequent  the  defeat,  however  adverse  men  and  fortune 
and  the  gods.  The  "  Aeneid  "  is  the  book  of  victory  de- 
ferred, as  imperial  Rome,  to  one  looking  backward  on 
her  past,  was  the  last  fruit  of  time,  the  late  issue  of  long 
and  perilous  struggle  through  generations.  Toil,  which 
in  the  song  of  Italy  was  linked  with  the  land,  is  here 
fused  with  the  power  of  empire;  but  it  is  toil  —  the 
same  Roman  idea,  though  more  informed  with  grand- 
eur, and  it  draws  with  it  the  same  rule  of  life,  obedience, 
though  more  set  forth  with  the  stem  absoluteness  that 
belonged  to  Roman  discipline.  If  Aeneas  offends  roman- 
tic sentiment  by  deserting  Dido  at  Carthage,  he  con- 
formed thereby  to  the  Roman  ideal  of  right  in  some  of 
its  deepest  foundations;  and  even  in  the  modem  view,  it 
may  be  suspected  that  if  in  place  of  the  wing-heeled 
[  13^^  ] 


VIRGIL 
Mercury  there  had  been  some  Hebrew  prophet  rebuk- 
ing an  erring  David,  the  sympathy  of  the  reader  might 
run  truer  with  the  thoughts  of  Virgil.  Rome  would  not 
tolerate  the  noblest  of  Antonys  forgetting  empire  in  pas- 
sion for  a  woman;  and  Aeneas,  in  abandoning  Dido, 
was  the  reverse  of  Antony,  and  measured  to  the  Roman 
rule  of  life.  Aeneas  gains,  and  is  truly  seen,  in  propor- 
tion as  the  mind  is  free  from  the  allurements  of  individ- 
uality, free  from  the  worship  of  the  ungovernable  hu- 
man power  in  life,  and  all  that  makes  against  the  ideal  of 
patience,  obedience  and  rule;  the  grandeur  of  the  indi- 
vidual is  found  in  Mezentius  and  Tumus,  creatures  of 
self-will  opposed  to  the  will  of  heaven,  and  herein  justly 
doomed  to  perish;  if  these  latter  seem  the  true  heroes,  it  is 
as  Satan  is  sometimes,  and  perhaps  popularly,  regarded 
as  the  hero  of  Milton,  but  to  Milton  Satan  was  infernal 
as  to  Virgil  Tumus  was  impious.  Aeneas  stands  at  the 
opposite  pole  of  conduct;  and  if  he  shares  the  defective 
attraction  which  the  typical  Roman  character  historically 
discloses,  he  the  more  illustrates  that  efficient  power  in 
life,  of  which  the  sense  greatens  as  time  clarifies  the 
mind  of  the  ardours  of  youth,  whether  in  men  or  nations; 
for  the  ideal  implanted  in  him,  hke  every  part  of  the 
poem,  bears  the  mark  of  a  world  grown  old. 

The  presence  of  Roman  time  in  the  verse,  especially 
the  sense  of  the  sorrows  that  are  the  price  of  empire,  is 
[133] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
also  profoundly  felt  in  Ihc  difTusion  of  pathos  through 
the  poem,  not  the  pathos  of  individual  lives  hut  of  the 
general  lot,  which  makes  it  the  saddest  book  of  the  world. 
It  contains  three  great  defeats;  the  destruction  of  Troy, 
the  fall  of  Carthage,  which  is  the  atmosphere  of  fate  in 
which  the  personal  tragedy  of  Dido  hums  out  on  her 
funeral  pyre,  and  the  overthrow  of  Tunius;  the  true  ac- 
tion is  contained  in  these  passages;  and,  in  addition, 
through  Aeneas  is  finally  successful,  his  checks  have 
been  so  many  and  his  success  is  so  long  delayed  and 
is  so  palely  realized  that  his  career,  in  the  impression  it 
makes,  may  almost  count  as  a  fourth  defeat.  Against  this 
scene  of  disaster  the  majesty  of  Rome's  final  triumph 
in  history,  though  it  fills  all  the  horizons  of  the  poem, 
blazes  in  vain.  Here  are  the  tears  of  time.  Lacrimae  rcrum 
seems  almost  the  other  name  of  the  "Aeneid, "  as  it 
is  its  best  known  and  central  phrase.  The  "chanter  of 
the  Pollio "  had  come  to  this.  He  who  was  the  first  to 
sound  the  strain  of  world-hope  was  also  now  the  first  to 
strike  that  parallel  chord  of  world-woe  which  has  re- 
verberated down  all  after  ages.  The  "  Miserere  "  follows 
the  "  Gloria  "  as  manhood  follows  youth.  If  the"Aeneid" 
were  only  a  poem  of  heroic  action,  and  not  a  symbol  of 
life  long  lived,  the  suffering  would  be  absorbed  in  the 
action;  but  the  poem  is  hea\y  with  thought  and  clouded 
with  feeling  hke  a  sun  strugghng  with  echpse.  The  in- 
[134] 


VIRGIL 

tellectual  force  in  it,  the  passion  of  thought,  Virgil's 
overmastering  sympathy  with  the  victim  —  and  Aeneas 
by  his  long  sufferings  is  essentially  a  victim  —  shake  its 
containing  bounds,  and  again  and  again  threaten  its 
epical  form.  A  thousand  lines  have  the  lyrical  cry;  they 
could,  and  do,  stand  alone,  each  one  a  poem.  The  dra- 
matic power  in  the  episode  of  Dido  threatens  to  over- 
bear the  moral  unity  of  the  structure;  the  didactic  depth 
of  teaching  in  the  descent  to  Hades  threatens  to  intermit 
the  sense  of  action  and  shift  the  scene  to  the  academy; 
and  at  every  turn,  when  the  epic  seems  slipping  from  his 
hand,  Virgil  invokes  Rome,  returns  to  that  ground-swell 
of  his  music,  and  fuses  all  disparate  elements  in  its  en- 
veloping power.  It  is  the  thought  of  Ascanius  and  the 
Julian  line  that  overrules  the  wrongs  of  Dido;  and  in  the 
Elysian  fields  it  is  the  encomium  of  Rome  —  the  most 
majestic  lines  ever  written  by  the  hand  of  man  —  and 
the  bead-roll  of  her  heroes  and  the  vision  of  her  Augus- 
tan triumph  that  restore  the  epical  interest  and  su- 
premacy. It  is  in  these  ways  most  truly  that,  as  Ten- 
nyson said,  this  "  ocean-roll  of  rhythm  sounds  forever  of 
imperial  Rome. " 

Rome,  too,  sustains  the  verse  in  its  weakest  part,   the 

mythology,  and  gives  to  that  debilitated    supernatural 

element  the  only  reality  which  it  contains.  Virgil  was 

born  too  late  to  be  a  true  believer  in  Olympus;  but  in 

[135] 


(iUEAT  VVHITEHS 
placinfT  the  prophecy  of  Rome  on  the  lips  of  Jupiter  and 
in  identifying  the  fate  of  Rome  with  the  divine  purpose 
and  will  he  made  the  mythological  creed  discharge  a 
true  and  important  function  in  the  poem,  and  in  fact  its 
only  function;  except  for  this,  Olympus  is  only  a  tradi- 
tional adornment,  a  part  of  the  mechanical  scheme  and 
surface  pictorialness  of  the  plot,  and  one  element  in  that 
many-sided  perspective  of  human  history  in  which  the 
poem  is  so  remarkably  beyond  all  others.  If,  however, 
Olympus  is  a  shadow  and  Virgil  recedes  from  it  in  his 
mind,  on  the  other  hand  he  is  far  advanced  and  moves 
forward  in  what  was  to  Homer  the  shadow-world,  the 
life  beyond  the  grave;  in  his  thought  and  sentiment  there 
is  not  only  the  sense  of  profound  reality,  but  he  touches 
on  the  confines  of  revealed  religion.  Here  most  strik- 
ingly, in  the  sweep  backward  to  the  still  A-isible  but 
fading  gods  and  in  the  sweep  forward  to  the  still  unborn 
Christian  ages,  the  "  Aeneid  "  shows  that  characteristic 
of  greatness  in  literature  which  hes  in  its  being  a  water- 
shed of  time;  it  looks  back  to  antiquity  in  all  that 
clothes  it  with  the  past  of  imagination,  character  and 
event,  and  forward  to  Christian  times  in  all  that  clothes 
it  with  emotion,  sentiment  and  finality  to  the  heart.  If, 
as  is  sometimes  said,  Gibbon's  history  is  the  bridge  be- 
tween the  ancient  and  the  modem  world,  the  "  Aeneid  " 
is  the  high  central  ridge  where  time  itself  joined  both. 
[130] 


VIRGIL 
Virgil  was  so  great  a  poet  because  he  assimilated  his 
vast  mental  experience,  and  turned  it,  in  the  true  Ro- 
man way,  to  power  over  the  future.  His  language  it- 
self—  and  he  was  the  "lord  of  language"  —  bears  the 
Roman  stamp.  Scarce  any  poet  is  so  brief;  like  all  the 
masters  of  poetic  speech  he  seldom  carries  his  sentence 
beyond  three  lines,  and  more  often  he  clasps  the  sense  in 
shorter  limits,  and  notably  in  those  "  half-lines  "  which 
are  so  often  spoken  of  as  the  special  characteristic  of  his 
style,  though  they  are  also  to  be  found  in  Shakspere  with 
like  power.  Oratory  belongs  to  the  epic  as  the  lyric  be- 
longs to  the  drama,  as  its  rhetorical  means  of  intensity; 
and  oratory  was  a  Roman  art.  It  belongs  to  Virgil  equal- 
ly with  liis  winged  music.  It  is  the  oratory  of  Brutus,  not 
of  Antony;  and  it  is  present  in  spirit  and  method,  not 
only  in  the  set  speeches  and  narratives,  but  in  the  general 
flow  of  the  verse;  the  weight  of  thought,  the  compact- 
ness of  vision,  the  intensity  of  the  lyrical  cry  of  feeling  it- 
self, are  indebted  to  it,  for  it  is  the  native  world  of  Ro- 
man speech,  and  Virgil  in  his  song  could  only  heighten, 
refine  and  amplify  it,  pour  it  in  more  lucid  and  tender 
voices  of  the  spirit,  which  was  none  the  less  a  Roman 
spirit.  It  is  common  to  regard  the  earlier  books  of  the 
"Aeneid"  which  are  more  inspired  by  the  Greek  ele- 
ment in  Virgil's  culture  as  the  greater;  but  in  the  later 
books  in  which  the  inspiration  of  the  home-land  prevails 
[137] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
more,  and  not  loss  cxccUcnlly  in  its  own  qualities,  if  the 
presence  of  Rome  is  less  imperially  impressive,  it  has 
more  primitive  charm.  The  early  air  of  Rome  is  here, 
the  youth  of  primeval  Italy,  when  Empire  was  far  away. 
In  Mezcntius  and  Turnus,  and  especially  in  Evandcr, 
there  is  an  original  impulse,  a  native  stamp;  and,  most  of 
all,  in  Camilla.  Few  poets  cast  a  new  type  of  woman- 
hood. Camilla  is  the  first  of  those  ideal  Italian  women 
who  have  glorified  the  pages  of  Tasso  and  the  canvasses, 
divine  and  human,  of  a  hundred  artists.  If  the  later  books 
of  the  "  Aeneid  "  are  less  valued,  it  is  partly  because  they 
are  purer  in  originality,  more  Italian  in  their  interest, 
and  in  limiting  themselves  to  the  evolution  of  a  roman- 
tic past  for  the  soil  of  Italy  and  the  beginnings  of  Rome 
make  a  narrower  appeal.  To  Yirgil  this  task  was,  per- 
haps, dearer  than  the  echoes  of  Troy  and  the  sorrows  of 
Carthage,  but  he  worked  with  names  that  sounded  less 
in  the  ears  of  the  w^orld.  In  one  respect  he  succeeds  mar- 
vellously; both  on  the  voyage  and  in  Italy  he  gives  the 
sense  of  the  early  Mediterranean  world  as  a  place  of 
wandering  colonists  and  rising  settlements  in  lonely 
places,  a  sense  of  the  taking  possession  of  the  virgin  land, 
■with  seas  and  coasts  and  spaces  never  to  be  crossed 
again ;  such  a  wonder-world  did  not  come  to  man's  \'iew 
a  second  time,  so  effectually,  till  the  days  of  Cortez  and 
Magellan  and  De  Soto,  in  the  dawn  of  the  Americas. 
[138] 


VIRGIL 

The  primitive  time,  such  as  it  is  shown  in  Evander,  has 
the  same  reaUty,  and  his  hospitaUty  has  retained  in  men's 
minds  its  place  as  the  historic  and  ideal  moment  of  the 
simplicities  of  the  first  life  of  men  on  still  unviolated  soil. 
If  one's  eye  is  on  the  Roman  spirit  of  the  poem,  he  will 
not  find  the  Italian  prepossession  of  its  last  books  an 
obstacle  to  liis  interest;  but  rather  the  charm  of  a  more 
home-bred  inspiration  will  endear  to  him  its  humihties, 
its  native  character  and  the  nobility  of  human  feeling 
which  is  nowhere  in  the  poem  so  constant,  pervasive  and 
pure.  If  Rome  is  less,  in  these  passages,  in  her  imperial 
form,  Italy  is  more;  and  it  is  that  Italy  in  which  the  true 
Rome  resided  and  to  which  she  returned,  of  which  the 
Empire  itself  now  seems  a  planet  she  cast  from  her  larger 
and  more  immortal  life. 

The  poem  of  Rome,  however,  even  though  such  a  na- 
tion as  Italy  fall  heir  to  it,  could  not  maintain  its  inti- 
macy with  the  modern  mind  and  continue  to  make  a  di- 
rect appeal  to  life,  unless  it  were  something  more.  There 
is  a  greatness  in  the  "  Aeneid  "  beyond  the  presence  of 
Rome  in  the  verse.  It  might  seem  that  Virgil  was  by  na- 
ture little  fitted  for  the  epic;  his  initiation  into  life  had 
been  through  that  "passive  youth"  wliich  Shelley  de- 
scribes, the  type  of  poetic  boyhood,  sensitive,  impressi- 
ble, inexhaustibly  recipient;  and  all  his  days  he  was  a 
scholar  drawing  into  his  brooding  thoughts  the  spectacle 
[139] 


GREAT  WRITERS 

of  tliinfjs  till  his  knowledge  was  equal  to  the  worUl- 
culture  of  liis  time;  that  such  a  man  should  give  back  to 
the  world  what  he  had  received  from  it  in  the  shape  of  a 
poem  of  action  seems  incongruous,  and,  doubtless,  like 
Tasso  and  Milton  and  Spenser  and  Tennyson,  in  their 
several  degrees,  he  experienced  the  natural  difficulties  of 
the  task.  Yet,  to  the  brooding  spirit,  not  thought,  but 
action  is  the  true  sphinx  of  life;  not  what  is  dreamed  or 
reasoned  or  desired,  but  what  is  done,  what  God  permits, 
as  the  phrase  goes,  the  power  of  unrighteousness  that  is 
nine-tenths  of  life;  this  fastens  the  eye,  perplexes  the 
mind,  disturbs  the  heart.  Virgil,  bom  late  and  acquaint- 
ed with  the  world  long  lived  in,  was  of  a  contemplative 
mind;  in  the  "Aeneid"  thought  shadows  every  word,  a 
subtle  judgment  blends  with  every  action  clothing  it,  as 
music  clothes  the  line,  in  an  element  of  its  own,  pitying, 
appealing,  affirming,  according  to  the  motions  of  the 
poet's  soul;  and  hence  the  "Aeneid"  has  its  grandest 
phase,  by  virtue  of  which  it  has  entered  into  the  hearts 
of  so  many  later  generations  and  still  enters.  It  is  a 
meditation  upon  life. 

The  modes  in  which  the  poem  thus  aflfects  the  reader 
are  infinitely  varied;  sometimes  so  intimate  as  to  seem 
the  voice  in  one's  own  heart  of  one's  own  Ufe,  or  so  lofty 
and  assured  as  to  seem  the  voice  of  all  men's  hearts,  or 
so  world-sweeping  in  its  pathos  as  to  seem  the  voice  di- 
[UO] 


VIRGIL 

vine.  Unbroken  is  the  sense  of  the  difficulty  of  Hfe,  not 
merely  under  its  old  conception  as  a  warfare,  but  as  a 
thing  of  burden,  of  frequent  mistake,  of  unforeseen  and 
unmerited  disaster,  of  repeated  defeat,  of  uncertain  is- 
sue; the  toiUng  power  of  Rome  is  made  up  of  the  in- 
numerable toils  of  miserable  men,  and  about  the  main 
actors  are  the  files  of  captive  women,  the  sons  burning 
on  their  funeral  pyres  before  the  faces  of  their  parents, 
all  the  wretchedness  of  a  military  state  for  the  private 
life.  The  element  of  difficulty  felt  in  the  reverses  of  the 
main  fortune  of  the  tale,  in  its  birth  in  the  terrors  of  the 
last  night  of  Ilium,  in  the  wrong  landings,  the  insidious 
dangers  of  Carthage,  the  burning  of  the  fleet,  is,  on  the 
individual  scale  broken  into  a  thousand  cries  of  death 
and  sorrow  essentially  personal  and  domestic.  Life  on 
land  and  sea  is  a  field  of  battle,  and  everyudiere  are 
corpses  rolled  by  Simois  or  the  ocean-wave,  and  in  every 
prospect  the  heart  follows  the  remnant  of  men,  in  their 
beaten  courage  ever  more  courageous,  but  none  the  less 
victims  of  life.  "  Pain,  pain,  ever,  forever, "  rings  through 
the  poem  like  a  Promethean  cry;  the  burden  of  Priam,  the 
burden  of  Dido,  the  burden  of  Tumus,  kingdom  after 
kingdom,  and  by  the  way  the  strewn  corpses  of  Palinu- 
rus,  Euryalus,  Pallas.  In  the  Elysian  fields  Aeneas 
marvels  why  any  soul  should  desire  to  see  the  light  of 
life.  Over  all  there  hangs  in  heaven  the  doubtful  interest 
[141] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
of  the  gods  in  human  fates.  "  If  any  gods  be  just "  —  "  if 
there  be  any  kindness  in  heaven  "  —  these  are  the  re- 
frains of  all  the  prayers.  In  the  presence  of  the  mystery 
of  what  is  done  on  earth  the  reason,  always  unsatisfied, 
will  not  be  silent  and  refuses  to  yield  its  just  share  in  the 
conduct  of  life;  if,  in  one  age,  the  tale  be  of  Eden  and  the 
Fall,  this  offends  the  mind's  sense  of  justice ;  if,  in  another 
time,  it  be  of  the  struggle  for  existence  from  the  dawn  of 
life,  this  offends  the  mind's  sense  of  mercy ;  in  knowledge 
of  justice  and  mercy,  the  mind  finds  its  own  superiority 
to  the  environment  in  which  it  is  imprisoned,  and  in  its 
moods  of  sincerest  reason  still  seeks  refuge  in  the  pro- 
visional prayer  on  Virgil's  hps. 

Lucretius  had  lived;  and  something  of  all  this  diffi- 
culty, pain  and  uncertainty  had  come  to  light  in  that 
great  intellect.  He  was  essentially  one  of  the  eternal  Pu- 
ritan brood,  personal  revoltcrs  against  church  and  state, 
w^hich  in  history  have  been  the  twin  t}Tants  of  mankind ; 
he  looked  back  on  the  past  and  saw  there  immense  and 
long-continued  error  in  important  parts  of  Hfe,  the  de- 
lusion and  woe  of  whole  peoples  since  time  began;  and 
he  denounced  superstition  as  the  mother  of  human  ills. 
He  was  an  individualist,  a  man  of  conscious  virtue,  self- 
sufficing;  he  had  an  empire  in  his  mind;  he  spoke  out,  a 
lonely  intellect  in  a  world  stripped  for  his  eyes  to  the 
bare  principles  of  its  being,  and  in  liis  words  was  the 
[U2] 


VIRGIL 
fiery  seed  of  the  new  universe  of  scientific  thought.  Vir- 
gil was  of  a  different  strain,  a  natural  worshipper,  rev- 
erent of  the  rite,  attached  to  the  mj-th,  clinging  with  his 
affections  to  the  outward  garniture  of  life  and  history; 
but  his  eyes  were  on  the  same  things  that  Lucretius  saw. 
He,  too,  was  finding  in  philosophy  the  true  goal.  He  felt 
from  youth  the  compelling  power  of  thought  of  Rome's 
greatest  mind  as  he  looked  out  on  the  long  Pagan  retro- 
spect of  life's  beauty  and  sorrow.  How  did  he  save  him- 
self from  the  intellectual  indignation,  the  despair  of  the 
divine,  the  earthly  pessimism  of  Rome's  great  sceptic; 
for  the  face  of  Virgil,  "majestic  in  his  sadness  at  the 
doubtful  doom  of  human  kind, "  is  the  grave  face  of  a 
behever.  He  saved  himself  by  the  power  of  love. 

He  was  a  lover  of  life;  only  an  immense  love  of  life 
could  have  so  revealed  to  him  the  pity  of  it.  At  every 
touch  he  shows  a  spirit  naturally  dependent ;  teachable, 
yielding,  hospitable,  responsive,  sympathetic,  appeaUng, 
his  heart  flows  out  upon  tilings,  uniting  with  them  at 
every  contact,  from  his  early  loves  of  nature,  romance 
and  antiquity,  his  long  passion  of  patriotism,  on  to  his 
brooding  over  the  fates  of  men;  and  yet  with  his  self -sur- 
render to  the  things  of  life  there  goes,  equal  with  it, 
the  true  Roman  self-control;  it  is  a  surrender  that  re- 
turns to  him  as  strength.  At  every  turn  of  the  verse  he 
evokes  the  moment  of  beauty  from  the  natural  world, 
[143] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
and  from  life  its  moment  of  pain,  with  the  clarity  of  the 
poet;  charm,  which  is  the  one,  and  pathos,  which  is  the 
other,  arc  the  words  that  leap  from  the  heart  in  the  mem- 
ory of  what  he  wrote,  and  after  these  the  third  is  majesty, 
which  is  the  principle  of  control  in  him,  and  completes 
and  perfects  his  genius.  These  are  wonderfully  softened 
by  liis  constant  tenderness.  The  epics  generally  find  no 
place  for  children  in  them ;  but  here  there  are  three  — 
Astyanax,  Ascanius  and  jNIarcellus  —  and  two  of  these 
are  dead  boys.  Of  all  Virgil's  loves,  the  greatest  in 
power  is  the  love  of  human  life ;  and  it  is  this  that  makes 
the  poem  so  Christian-like,  because  it  is  embodied  and 
conveyed  in  the  forms  of  sorrow  and  especially  of  be- 
reavement. Yet  the  burden  of  that  sorrow  comes  as  the 
burden  of  the  Roman  world  running  its  long  career  of 
battle-strife ;  here  is  the  heart  of  Rome  beating  in  the  only 
Roman  breast  in  which  it  had  become  fully  conscious  of 
itself.  The  world  was  ready  to  be  re-bom;  there  is  no 
break;  the  premonitions  of  Christian  feeling  are  natural 
to  Virgil.  It  is  this  that  makes  him  of  all  ancient  writers 
the  nearest  to  modem  times,  of  all  epic  poets  the  nearest 
to  all  nations.  The  "Aeneid"  is,  I  think,  the  greatest 
single  book  written  by  man  because  if  its  inclusiveness 
of  human  hfe,  of  hfe  long  lived,  in  the  things  of  life.  It  is 
the  dirge  of  Rome;  majestic  in  its  theme,  beautiful  in  its 
emotions,  sad  in  its  philosophy,  it  is  almost  the  dirge  of 
[U4] 


VIRGIL 
lie;  yet  many  a  modern  mind  still  turns  from  the  con- 
templation of  human  Hfe  in  history,  like  the  thousands 
of  old  days,  to  Virgil,  and  says  with  Dante,  Tu  se'  lo  mio 
maestro,  "  Thou  art  my  master.  " 


[145] 


Great  Writers 

V 


MONTAIGNE 


Montaigne  was  one  of  the  great  confessors  of  life.  The 
confession  is  a  paradox;  for  he  reveals  himself,  and  it  is 
the  reader  who  stands  revealed.  A  personal  writer,  whose 
whole  story  is  about  himself,  as  he  says,  matters  of  his 
own  career,  opinions,  anecdotes,  trivialities  of  the  daily 
life,  a  diary  of  privacies ;  yet  throughout  it  is  not  he  who 
is  interesting,  but  that  human  nature  of  which  he  is  the 
showman.  His  work  is  not  to  represent  life,  as  the  novel- 
ist does  in  fiction,  but  to  illustrate  it  by  his  own  example. 
The  fortune  of  those  who  have  been  drawn  to  him,  now 
for  three  centuries,  is  identical ;  they  all  claim  a  share  in 
his  individuality.  Emerson  says  of  that  copy  he  found  in 
his  father's  library:  " It  seemed  to  me  as  if  I  had  myself 
written  the  book,  in  some  former  life,  so  sincerely  it 
spoke  to  my  thought  and  experience."  Byron  heard  the 
same  personal  tone  in  it.  Not  all  of  Emerson  is  there, 
not  all  of  Byron ;  there  are  neither  heights  nor  depths  of 
[149] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
Ihe  soul  in  the  book;  but  human  nature  in  the  norm  of 
its  range,  in  its  middle  flight,  in  its  average  of  the  gen- 
tleman, a  little  knowledge,  a  little  morals,  a  little  relig- 
ion, with  much  moderation  and  good  sense  —  these  are 
there,  exemplifying  the  practical  life  of  the  great  and 
small  in  the  world  in  which  Montaigne  lived  and  in 
which  his  admirers  have  lived  after  him.  In  the  practice 
of  life  that  the  world  wills,  Montaigne  is  a  master;  he  is 
its  morahst;  the  "  Essays  "  contain  its  rule  and  counsels, 
and  are  vivaciously  varied  by  the  gossipy  inten\'oven 
tale  of  his  adventures,  body  and  soul. 

Montaigne,  nevertheless,  had  in  his  own  right  the  fig- 
ure that  arrests  the  eye  and  traits  that  jet  from  the  mem- 
ory in  high  relief.  One  thinks  of  him  commonly  in  con- 
nection with  his  famous  tower,  the  great  Tour  de  Mon- 
taigne, that  overhangs  the  entrance  of  the  chateau, 
round,  dungeon-like,  massive,  in  the  uppermost  of  whose 
three  stories  is  the  circular  room,  spacious,  with  its  raft- 
ers on  which  were  cut  inscriptions,  the  author's  mottoes 
of  life,  and  its  deep  embrasured  windows  through  which 
he  looked  out  to  three  parts  of  heaven,  on  the  garden, 
farm-yard  and  court,  and  over  the  sloping  estates  to  the 
distant  Perigord  hills;  here  was  his  library,  and  Mon- 
taigne is  thought  of  here,  in  retirement,  like  a  solitary 
surveying  the  world.  But  this  is  a  fantastic  conception. 
He  was  in  reality  a  man  of  affairs  all  his  life;  he  had  the 
[150] 


MONTAIGNE 

mind  of  a  man  of  affairs,  with  something  superadded. 
The  best  inheritance  he  drew  from  his  father,  an  active , 
capable,  successful  man,  was  the  athletic  vigour  and 
business  capacity  that  did  him  yeoman  service  in  that 
age  when  both  were  needed  to  keep  one's  feet  in  the 
world  about;  but  to  his  father  he  also  owed  that  added 
something  —  he  owed  a  careful  education.  The  elder 
Montaigne,  though  not  learned,  was  the  friend  of  schol- 
ars, and  experienced  that  new  interest  in  the  intellectual 
life  which  in  his  day  was  moulding  France  as  the  Ren- 
aissance spread  to  the  northwest  out  of  Italy;  it  was  a 
movement  that  dealt  much  with  education  and  favoured 
originality,  experiment,  eccentricity  even;  and  it  was, 
perhaps,  by  the  touch  of  Italian  conversation  and  ideas 
that  the  father  determined  that  the  son  should  be 
brought  up  with  Latin  for  his  mother  tongue.  He  had 
already  put  the  boy  to  nurse  in  the  country  with  poor 
people,  in  order  that  he  might  have  his  mind  and  sym- 
pathy open  to  the  life  of  the  humble,  and  so  contract  a 
lively  feeling  of  their  condition;  and  now  he  secured 
proper  instruction,  a  learned  German  who  taught  the 
child  to  speak  in  Latin  from  his  earliest  accents,  while 
all  who  came  in  contact  with  him  were  compelled  to  con- 
form to  the  rule,  even  the  servants,  so  that  this  chatter, 
it  is  said,  left  traces  in  the  country  speech.  The  boy  felt 
and  talked  in  Latin  till  he  was  six  years  old,  and  later  in 
[151] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
life  French  was  so  much  less  natural  to  him  that  in  mo- 
ments of  deep  excitement  the  instinctive  words  in  his 
brain  were  Latin,  He  was  bred  at  college  from  six  to 
thirteen,  immediately  put  to  the  law,  and  made  counsel- 
lor at  twenty-one,  in  which  capacity  three  years  later  he 
became  one  of  the  Parliament  of  Bordeaux,  the  city  that 
throughout  his  life  was  the  stage  of  his  public  actions  and 
of  which  his  father  was  mayor.  The  family  by  its  integ- 
rity, kindness  and  energy,  had  long  held  a  well-estab- 
lished place  in  the  province.  On  his  father's  death,  jMon- 
taigne  who  had  married  some  five  years  before  became 
its  head.  The  inscription  which  records  his  accession 
may  still  be  read  at  the  chateau,  as  follows: 

"In  the  year  of  our  Lord  1571,  aged  thirty-eight,  on 
the  eve  of  the  Kalends  of  March,  the  anniversary  day  of 
his  birth,  Michel  de  Montaigne,  having  long  been  weary 
of  the  slavery  of  courts  and  public  employments,  takes 
refuge  in  the  bosom  of  the  learned  Virgins.  He  designs 
in  quiet  and  indifference  to  all  things,  to  conclude  there 
the  remainder  of  his  life,  already  more  than  half -past, 
and  he  has  dedicated  to  repose  and  liberty  this  agreeable 
and  peaceful  abode,  which  he  has  inherited  from  bis 
ancestors." 

When  Montaigne  thus  sought  the  private  life  in  the 
middle  of  his  years,  he  had  already  lived  a  full  and  ac- 
tive career  in  a  station  of  moderate  distinction  wliicb 
[152] 


MONTAIGNE 
had  brought  him  in  contact  with  various  aspects  of  the 
human  lot.  He  knew  the  hfe  of  the  court  and*  had  led  it 
at  Paris  and  elsewhere  with  a  young  man's  interest, 
with  gallant  adventures,  with  gaming  and  episodes  and 
debauch,  and  on  all  sides  he  had  formed  ties  with  per- 
sons of  power.  He  knew  the  life  of  the  camp,  and  had 
followed  it,  as  the  custom  was,  at  sieges  and  on  marches 
to  which  a  young  man  of  his  position  would  go  at  his  will 
and  come  away  at  his  choice.  He  knew  the  life  of  admin- 
istrative affairs  to  which  his  post  in  the  Parliament 
obhged  him  and  by  which  he  was  brought  into  serious 
concerns  affecting  his  locality  and  the  interests  of  his 
faith  and  country.  He  had  taken  no  leading  part,  but  he 
had  observed  human  life  in  many  ways,  and  he  had 
learned  to  keep  his  balance  in  a  difficult  age.  He  was  a 
firm  Catholic  and  loyalist,  but  he  had  the  art  of  remain- 
ing on  good  terms  with  all  parties,  and  in  his  own  coun- 
try which  was  in  the  disturbed  region  he  suffered  but  lit- 
tle in  the  religious  and  civil  dissensions  that  distracted 
and  oppressed  the  times  with  the  changing  fortunes  of 
Henry  of  Navarre.  He  was  that  marvel  of  the  moral  life, 
a  man  of  integrity  who  is  a  master  of  compromise. 

An  entirely  different  phase  is  revealed  in  the  only  in- 
cident of  distinction  that  marked  his  early  years.  This 
was  his  friendship  with  Estienne  de  la  Boetie,  a  fellow- 
counsellor  in  the  Parliament  of  Bordeaux,  famous  as  the 
[153] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
youthful  author  of  the  most  eloquent  attack  ever  made 
upon  the  institution  of  Monarchy,  wliich  thouf^h  then 
circulated  was  not  published  for  many  years,  and  known 
also  as  a  poet.  The  two  young  men  were  of  about  the 
same  age,  and  their  friendship,  wliich  was  meant  by 
themselves  to  restore  the  classical  example  to  the  world, 
was  terminated  after  six  years  by  La  Boetie's  early 
death.  This  attachment  is  one  of  the  legends  of  htera- 
ture,  and  in  it  Montaigne  showed  most  heart  beyond  any 
other  action  of  his  life.  He  idolized  it  after  the  ancient 
model  in  his  essay  on  "Friendship;"  he  wrote  a  minute 
account  of  the  death-bed  scenes,  with  the  classical  touch, 
but  real;  and  his  references  to  his  loss  are  among  the 
few  passages  of  his  writings  that  have  poignancy.  His 
first  task  when  he  became  master  of  himself  in  the  world 
was  to  edit  such  of  his  friend's  papers  as  it  seemed  dis- 
creet to  publish,  but  he  reserved  the  immortal  essay  on 
"  Monarchy  "  for  less  turbulent  times  and  the  next  age. 
It  was  not  in  his  character  to  find  in  his  pious  duties  to 
the  dead  a  legacy  of  unrest  that  might  disturb  the  years 
which  he  had  dedicated  to  "  repose  and  hberty." 

Montaigne's  retirement  was  by  no  means  absolute. 
Throughout  the  score  of  years  that  it  lasted  before  death 
carried  him  off  at  the  edge  of  sixty,  he  kept  in  touch  with 
the  business  of  this  world ;  and  his  privacy  was  especially 
broken  by  two  events,  his  travels  into  Italy  and  his  in- 
[154] 


MONTAIGNE 

cumbency  of  the  mayoralty  of  Bordeaux.  The  Itahan 
journey,  which  took  place  after  eight  years  of  labour  on 
the  "Essays"  and  when  he  was  forty-seven  years  old,  was 
primarily  undertaken  on  the  score  of  health  since  he  had 
become  subject  to  the  stone,  and  he  may  also  have  de- 
sired to  observe  the  effect  of  the  first  publication  of  his 
work,  then  just  issued,  on  his  reputation.  He  saw  Paris, 
assisted  at  a  siege,  and  made  his  way  by  Baden  and  the 
Tyrol  to  Venice,  and  thence  to  the  chief  cities  of  north- 
em  and  central  Italy,  visiting  the  baths  and  taking  the 
waters  by  the  way.  He  was  an  excellent  traveller.  He 
rode  on  horseback,  a  habit  which  he  greatly  enjoyed, 
with  a  sufficient  but  not  too  expensive  suite,  in  the  style 
befitting  a  French  gentleman  of  his  rank;  and  he  took 
pains  to  live  in  the  country  according  to  its  own  customs, 
to  mix  with  its  people  and  lay  aside  his  native  prejudices, 
to  get  the  full  benefit  of  travel  by  means  of  a  lively  curi- 
osity, an  open  mind  and  a  hospitable  manner.  He  was 
bound  by  no  rule  or  plan,  but  zigzagged  along  accord- 
ing to  his  mood,  doubling  on  his  track  or  deviating  from 
it  as  the  fancy  took  him ;  and  in  all  places  he  conformed 
and  gave  way  and  reaped  his  harvest  of  experience  and 
observation.  Social  tact  distinguished  him.  He  got  on 
with  the  papal  critics  of  the  "  Index,"  who  handled  his 
"  Essays"  with  some  doubtfulness,  just  as  he  had  done 
with  Henry  of  Navarre,  and  they  left  him  to  make  his  own 
[155] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
emendations.  lie  gave  a  dance  for  the  country  girls  at 
the  Baths  of  Lucca.  He  made  friends  everj'whcre.  In 
spite  of  acute  attacks  of  illness,  with  discomfort  and 
wearing  pain,  he  maintained  an  even  and  settled  de- 
meanour, and  thoroughly  enjoyed  the  new  scenes,  the 
honourable  entertainment  and  the  variety  of  life  and 
manners.  The  note-book  which  constitutes  his  Travels 
reveals  the  man  as  plainly  and  more  simply  than  the 
"Essays."  Posterity  remembers  out  of  it  two  things,  the 
eloquent  description  of  the  ruins  of  Rome,  and  the  offer- 
ing which  he  was  solicitous  to  hang  up  at  Loretto  —  "a 
framed  tablet  with  four  silver  figures  attached,  repre- 
senting our  Lady,  myself,  my  wife  and  my  daughter." 

He  spent  a  year  and  a  half  in  this  journey,  and  it  was 
still  unfinished  when  he  received  news  of  his  election  to 
the  mayoralty  of  Bordeaux.  He  made  his  return  without 
haste,  and  as  soon  as  he  had  arrived  told  them,  he  says, 
"  what  they  had  to  expect  of  me  —  no  memory,  no  %'igil- 
ance,  no  experience,  no  vigour;  but  also  no  hatred,  no 
ambition,  no  avarice,  and  no  violence."  It  was  an  ex- 
cellent programme  that  was  thus  promised  in  the  dis- 
tressed situation  of  affairs,  and  the  character  of  Mon- 
taigne for  justice,  moderate  temper  and  tact  must  have 
much  commended  him  in  that  time  and  place ;  he  pleased 
well  enough  to  receive  the  unusual  distinction  of  a  re- 
election, and  thus  served  for  four  years.  It  was  charac- 
[156] 


MONTAIGNE 

teristic  of  his  career  that  he  entertained  Henry  of  Na- 
varre at  his  chateau  in  the  last  year  of  his  term,  ^nd  that, 
a  pestilence  desolating  the  country  at  its  conclusion,  he 
declined  to  return  to  the  stricken  city  to  preside  at  his 
successor's  election.  He  was  an  expert  avoider  of  risks. 
He  was  careful  to  leave  his  chateau  undefended  in  order 
not  to  invite  attack,  and  this  device  succeeded;  but  he 
owed  his  extraordinary  immunity  from  the  ravage  and 
insult  of  either  party  to  his  character  and  manners.  Once 
when  a  hostile  company  had  entered  the  chateau  by  a 
kind  of  stealth,  Montaigne's  hospitable  good  nature 
carried  the  matter  so  well  that  the  leader  took  his  party 
off  without  sign  of  the  injury  that  had  been  intended; 
and  once  when  Montaigne  was  stopped  on  the  road  and 
robbed,  his  bold  spirit  and  fair  temper  so  told  in  his  fa- 
vour that  he  was  released  and  warned  of  other  danger  by 
the  captain  of  the  band.  He  was  not  deficient  in  courage, 
but  what  carried  him  through  in  so  many  difficult  and 
delicate  situations  was  his  knowledge  of  men  and  his 
open  appearance,  his  mastery  of  social  intercourse.  He 
had  none  of  the  traits  of  a  recluse ;  he  was  more  a  soldier 
and  a  man  of  pleasure,  used  to  the  business  of  life,  sin- 
cere, honest,  moderate,  and  above  all  adroit.  In  his 
travels,  his  office,  his  adventures  of  whatever  kind,  he 
has  the  stamp  of  the  man  who  lives,  who  knows  how  to 
take  and  give  in  a  real  world,  and  to  whom  living  is  more 
[157] 


GRKAT  \VK1TE«S 
primary  than  thinking  —  in  other  words,  the  man  of 
action. 

Montaigne,  the  writer,  none  the  less,  was  formed  by 
his  education.  Education  had  an  equal  importance  with 
life  in  stamping  that  image  of  personality.  It  was  a  class- 
ical education,  but  he  did  not  get  it  at  school.  The  col- 
lege where  he  was  bred  in  his  boyhood  years  was  one  of 
the  most  distinguished  in  France,  but  it  was  one  of  those 
hells  which  civilization  has  imposed  on  the  suffering 
youth  of  most  generations.  Montaigne  tells  us  how 
he  slipped  away  from  his  routine  tasks  and  read  by 
stealth  his  Ovid  and  Virgil  and  found  his  true  world 
there.  He  gave  liis  education  to  himself  by  reading 
in  his  manhood.  The  important  books  were  of  course 
the  ancients.  The  Latin  authors  he  read  in  their  own 
tongue  in  which  he  was  well  grounded,  and  the  Greek 
authors  for  the  most  part  in  the  translations  then 
made  by  the  French  humanists;  and,  generally  speak- 
ing, he  knew  the  Greek  authors  later  than  the  Latin, 
and  especially  Plato  came  to  him  toward  the  close  of  his 
life.  He  was  essentially  a  pupil  of  Plutarch,  a  sort  of 
man  who  has  become  in  our  culture  extinct  but  in  the 
sixteenth  century  flourished  in  the  new  lands  of  the  Re- 
naissance; and  especially  he  was  an  intellectual  child  of 
Plutarch,  the  moralist.  ^Vhen  poetry  began  to  grow  shal- 
low in  interest  to  Montaigne,  as  it  belonged  to  his  nature 
[158] 


MONTAIGNE 
that  it  should,  history  and  biography  became  the  food  of 
his  serious  thought.  They  appealed  to  him  because  they 
illustrate  life ;  and  it  was  life  that  Montaigne  held  as  the 
centre  of  his  meditation  always  —  not  life  in  its  princi- 
ples, but  rather  life  as  it  is  lived,  the  scene  of  life.  For 
example,  he  says  that  he  always  had  great  curiosity  to 
know  how  men  died,  and  would  eagerly  inquire  for  all 
the  details.  Plutarch  in  his  various  writings  gives  im- 
mense illustration  of  life  thus  viewed  in  all  its  aspects, 
and  with  it  a  wealth  of  apposite  reflection  on  human  na- 
ture and  the  fortunes  of  men.  The  conduct  of  life  broadly 
speaking  is  his  theme,  as  it  became  Montaigne's.  To  all 
such  knowledge  out  of  antiquity  Montaigne  added  the 
memoirs  and  narratives  of  the  recent  world.  He  applied 
this  to  his  own  ends.  To  him  all  these  facts  of  life  were 
not  an  affair  of  learning,  not  information,  gossip,  but 
means  by  which  he  came  to  a  better  understanding  of 
human  nature,  or,  as  he  said,  of  himself.  His  proper 
study,  he  affirmed,  was  only  himself.  The  power  of  his 
education  consisted  in  the  vital  connection  he  made 
through  it  between  himself  and  the  story  of  men's  lives 
as  he  picked  up  its  multitude  of  fragments  in  the  bio- 
graphical and  historical  records  of  past  times.  For  prin- 
ciples of  conduct,  for  maxim  and  apothegm,  he  fell  back 
on  Seneca,  and  with  all  the  discursive  philosophy  of  the 
later  ancient  world  he  was  in  touch;  but  he  became  a 
[159] 


GREAT  WUITEUS 
moralist  because  he  was  primarily  an  observer,  and  he 
was  always  more  interested  in  the  premises  than  in  the 
conclusions  of  his  thoughts,  more  absorbed  in  the  curi- 
ous spectacle  of  human  phenomena  than  in  tlic  laws  of 
human  nature.  lie  had  an  immense  interest  in  things 
human,  and  this  gave  him  the  secret  of  originality.  "I 
am  human,"  he  said.  "I  am  immensely  interesting  to 
myself,  I  will  write  about  myself."  The  "  Essays  "  were 
thus  engendered.  This  directness  of  Montaigne  belongs 
to  the  man,  to  his  vital  energy.  He  had  been  formed  by 
life,  it  is  true;  but  in  his  mind,  the  mind  of  a  man  of  af- 
fairs, there  was,  as  I  have  said,  something  superadded; 
it  was  a  meditative  habit.  There  was,  however,  nothing 
of  the  closet  in  it,  nothing  of  the  abstract  and  logical,  the 
speculative  for  its  own  sake ;  it  was  a  thing  of  experience, 
empirical.  The  intellectual  part  of  his  book  is  a  medita- 
tion upon  life  as  something  observed,  recorded,  prac- 
tised ;  the  vivid  reality  of  the  book,  which  makes  it  seem 
often  written  by  the  reader,  springs  from  this.  A  man  of 
affairs,  in  his  ripeness,  meditating  upon  the  business  of 
living,  with  cogency,  with  brilliancy,  with  unexampled 
frankness  —  tliis  was  what  life  and  education  combined 
to  make  of  Montaigne;  and  the  "Essays"  are  the  mind 
of  such  a  man. 

Montaigne  was  a  bom  man  of  letters,  but  like  many 
men  so  bom  he  did  not  think  of  making  the  career.  His 
[160] 


MONTAIGNE 
father's  house  was  a  place  of  books,  of  scholars  and  the 
intellectual  ferment  of  the  age;  he  had  been  tj-ained  by 
men  of  learning  and  had  mingled  with  the  poets  of  the 
times;  but  he  showed  no  early  disposition  to  write  a 
book.  There  was  no  adolescence  in  his  genius.  For  learn- 
ing he  had  the  characteristic  literary  contempt.  The  first 
requisite  for  any  career  for  him  was  that  it  should  be  a 
life.  Montaigne  had  that  secret,  which  has  so  often  de- 
veloped the  highest  literary  faculty,  the  power  to  absorb 
life  into  himself  directly,  to  let  life  have  its  way  with  him 
as  an  experience,  and  yet  to  maintain  in  the  midst  of  it 
complete  possession  of  himself,  to  lead  his  own  life.  He 
established  terms  with  his  environment.  With  that  facil- 
ity which  seems  rather  a  characteristic  of  southern  than 
of  northern  peoples,  he  accepted  the  social  fictions  with 
all  solemnity.  He  was  a  true  Catholic  in  faith;  and  the 
truth  revealed  through  the  church,  with  the  observance 
of  its  attendant  and  customary  ritual,  as  things  beyond 
the  pale  of  what  is  merely  human  —  this  was  accepted 
as  being  imposed  by  his  baptism;  he  conformed,  and  did 
so  with  apparent  sincerity.  He  was  a  true  loyalist,  and 
the  system  of  state,  with  its  ritual  also,  was  accepted  as 
being  imposed  by  his  birth  in  the  country  and  under  the 
crown ;  he  conformed  in  secular  as  in  religious  matters  to 
things  established.  But  this  being  settled,  he  remained 
the  master  of  himself  in  both  thought  and  action,  the 
[161] 


GREAT  WRITEHS 
man  of  his  own  choice.  lie  was  }jy  temperament  Epi- 
curean, given  to  an  indulgent  habit  of  pleasure,  with  the 
wisdom  of  the  moderates;  yet  his  character  was  of  a 
more  vigorous  stock  than  such  words  imply;  he  was 
hardy  and  sufficiently  energetic.  Indeed  there  was  in  his 
spirit  a  nobler  capacity,  a  movement  toward  enthusiasm 
even,  and  a  power  of  admiration  that  is  most  often 
found  in  alliance  with  more  active  and  ardent  ambition 
than  belonged  to  his  nature.  The  Stoical  precepts  awak- 
ened a  glow  in  him,  the  personality  of  Socrates  seized 
him  with  the  fervour  of  hero-worship,  Cicero  disturbed 
him  by  his  weaknesses.  But  this  strength,  this  latent  pas- 
sion, this  capacity  to  be  morally  great  never  reached  the 
kindling  point.  One  is  aware  of  it  by  its  heat,  but  never 
by  its  flame.  He  had  dedicated  himself  to  repose  as  well 
as  to  Hberty;  he  would  pass  life  agreeably  —  that  was 
the  main  thing.  He  was  active  intellectually  rather  than 
morally;  his  curiosity  was  unlimited,  and  what  it  brought 
him  was  the  food  of  untiring  and  discursive  reflection; 
but,  before  all,  he  was  a  moralist  in  the  scientific  spirit  of 
exploration,  and  not  at  all  in  the  prosel}i;izing  spirit  of 
the  believer. 

He  discovered  himself  as  a  writer  almost,  it  would 

seem,  by  one  of  those  accidents  of  life  wliich  are  also  not 

uncommon  in  the  history  of  literature.  He  was  not  an 

author,  and  apparently  had  nothought  of  being  one,when 

[162] 


MONTAIGNE 

his  father  put  into  his  hands  a  book  which  he  asked 
him  to  translate.  It  was  a  theological  work  of  the  times 
of  the  Reformation,  a  "  Natural  Theology "  by  Ray- 
mond de  Sebonde,  written  in  a  curious  sort  of  Spanish 
with  Latin  terminations  and  left  at  the  chateau  by  one 
of  the  elder  Montaigne's  scholarly  visitors,  an  attempt 
to  show  the  truth  of  religion  on  grounds  of  human  rea- 
son independent  of  revelation.  Montaigne  translated  this 
work,  and  it  was  afterward  pubhshed.  Later  he  was  led 
to  compose  an  apology  or  defence  of  it,  a  paper  included 
in  his  "  Essays  "  and  the  longest  of  them.  Li  the  medita- 
tion of  this  important  piece  and  in  writing  out  his 
thoughts  Montaigne  seems  to  have  found  himself  intel- 
lectually; and  it  may  fairly  be  said  that  the  various  mat- 
ter of  the  famous  "  Essays  "  flowed  from  the  author  of 
the  "  Apology "  as  truly  as  Scott's  Novels  proceeded  in 
their  long  sequence  from  "the  Author  of  Waverley." 
The  conjunction  of  the  two  names  is  suggestive ;  for,  at 
not  far  from  the  same  mature  period  of  manhood  as 
Scott  began  his  career  in  fiction,  and  from  a  similar 
foundation  of  life  that  had  practically  fed  his  genius  un- 
intermittently  in  the  moral  sphere  by  affairs  and  books, 
Montaigne  like  Scott  at  the  moment  of  Waverley  was  at 
the  moment  of  his  apology  for  Raymond  de  Sebonde  at 
the  point  of  ignition ;  he  had  been  prepared  by  tempera- 
ment, experience  and  studies,  in  a  purely  practical  way, 
[163] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
without  literary  premeditation,  to  become  the  great  mor- 
ah.st  of  life  that  the  "  Essays  "  revealed.  Montaigne,  hke 
Scott  and  Cervantes,  was  the  product  of  life,  in  which 
studies,  it  is  true,  were  a  large  element,  but  of  which 
reality  was  the  substance  and  vigour;  his  book  is  conse- 
quently one  of  those  greatest  books  in  which  life  is  su- 
preme. The  centre  of  it  is  Montaigne  himself,  because 
that  was  the  point  where  for  him  Ufe  converged  all  its 
forces;  and  hence,  too,  it  is  often  and  habitually  a  book 
of  apparent  egotisms,  of  trivialities,  of  confidences,  as  of 
a  man  talking  with  a  friend  and  of  a  friend,  with  the 
frankness  of  privacy;  but  this  personality  which  is  the 
centre  of  Montaigne's  world  is  also  the  centre  of  all  of  us, 
it  is  human  nature,  it  is  ourselves.  In  this  book  life  is  so 
supreme  that  the  reader  himself  lives  in  it. 

Montaigne's  subject  which  he  unfolds  in  the  "Es- 
says "  is  the  scene  of  hfe,  that  existence  of  which  "  all  the 
world's  a  stage."  He  does  not  do  tliis  by  the  methods  of 
the  imagination,  as  the  poet  and  novelist  do.  He  brings 
to  the  task  observation,  history,  biography,  all  that  ex- 
perience has  given  him  from  his  personal  career  or  that 
he  had  drawTi  from  recent  times,  and  in  addition  the 
great  bulk  of  recorded  life  that  the  philosophers  and  es- 
sapsts  and  historians  of  antiquity  had  gathered,  a  mass 
of  detail  that  was  as  modem  to  him  as  the  facts  of  jour- 
nalism. This  great  body  of  real  experience  and  moral 
[164] 


MONTAIGNE 
reflection  upon  it  which  man  had  accumulated  at  the  end 
of  the  classical  civilization  had  been  displaced  by  the 
Christian  ages,  but  in  Montaigne's  day  it  flowed  back 
upon  men's  minds  through  the  channels  of  the  Renais- 
sance ;  and  it  has  now  again  been  displaced  by  the  insur- 
gence  of  the  modern  ages  of  colonization,  industrialism, 
mechanical  science,  and  in  its  stead  we  have  a  different 
history  and  other  biographies  and  travels  which  have  not 
yet  developed  that  finality  as  an  accumulated  result  of 
long  living  which  belongs  to  antiquity.  Montaigne  thus 
stands,  as  it  were,  in  the  Renaissance  gap  between  the 
Christian  and  modem  ages,  and  surveys  life  "looking 
before  and  after,"  by  the  undying  lamp  that  he  had 
found  in  the  Roman  tomb.  He  has  placed  Christianity 
on  one  side,  and,  having  made  his  peace  with  it,  it 
troubles  him  no  more ;  he  has  hung  up  the  votive  images 
in  the  shrine  of  Loretto,  and  will  die  when  the  time 
comes  in  the  proper  odours  and  acts;  but  merely  as  the 
reasoning  animal  that  is  earthly  man  he  will  examine 
human  nature  without  regard  to  its  spiritual  part  which 
is  a  thing  whose  habitat  is  the  church.  Human  nature,  so 
considered,  is  the  same  that  it  was  in  classical  times  and 
is  perhaps  there  more  simply  observed  because  of  the 
absence  of  any  entanglement  with  revealed  truth.  Mon- 
taigne thus,  though  he  did  not  live  in  the  past,  lived,  in  a 
sense,  in  the  thoughts  of  the  past,  and  hence  one  feels  in 
[IGo] 


GREAT  WRITERS 

the  "  Essays  "  a  certain  breath  of  remoteness  at  times,  a 
certain  mustiness  of  thought.  The  idea  of  death,  for  ex- 
ample, was  a  fixed  idea  of  ancient  moralists;  and  Mon- 
taigne is  much  concerned  with  it,  as  if  it  were  as  impor- 
tant for  him  as  for  Cato  and  Seneca,  as  if  he  were  under 
the  same  need  of  Stoical  rather  than  Christian  prepara- 
tion for  it,  more  as  a  mortal  end  than  an  immortal  be- 
ginning. This  idea  is,  no  doubt,  part  of  his  literary  leg- 
acy; he  could  not  avoid  prepossession  with  it,  his  authors 
being  what  they  were;  but  its  importance  in  his  reflec- 
tion indicates  a  pre-Christian  mood  in  his  mind,  marks 
the  infection  of  his  paganism,  discloses  the  intellectual 
and  moral  atavism  which  was  imbedded  in  the  Renais- 
sance. The  Stoical  insistence  on  the  idea  of  death  is  the 
trait  of  a  dying  culture;  it  could  not  fill  the  mind  of  a 
Christian  in  that  antique  way  unless  he  were  already  de- 
tached in  soul  from  the  lessons  of  his  own  faith  to  some 
degree.  In  Montaigne  this  interest,  except  in  so  far  as  it 
was  purely  Uterary,  marks  a  reversion  to  a  past  type  of 
intellect,  a  dislocation  from  his  age  which  assimilates 
him  with  the  great  world-minds  independent  of  their 
origin  from  any  particular  age;  in  fact,  while  seem- 
ing a  mere  reversion  mentally,  it  signifies  really  his  mod- 
ern enfranchisement.  Such  an  escape  into  the  past  was 
the  way  to  a  cosmopolitan  point  of  view. 

This  cosmopolitan  habit  was,  in  fact,  Montaigne's  dis- 
[IGG] 


MONTAIGNE 
tinction.  What  an  excellent  traveller  he  was  is  seen  in  his 
account  of  the  Italian  journey;  but  he  was  a  better  trav- 
eller in  his  mind.  An  enlightened  spirit,  a  mind  hospit- 
able to  new  things,  a  marvellous  power  of  detaching  him- 
self from  his  own  heredity  and  civilization  belonged  to 
him;  his  mind  was  not  repelled,  but  freshened  by  nov- 
elty and  strangeness.  In  the  reports  of  travellers  from 
the  Perus  and  the  Indias  he  sought  out  manners  and 
customs,  the  differences  from  what  was  established  in 
European  habits  and  ideas;  he  was  interested  in  what 
these  savages  and  pagans  had  made  of  themselves  in 
their  own  worlds  apart.  The  page  of  antiquity,  too,  in 
which  liis  curiosity  was  so  much  absorbed,  held  a  broad 
and  various  world,  the  old  Mediterranean  civilization  of 
many  races,  institutions,  religions,  thoughts,  careers. 
This  past  in  all  its  diversity  was,  too,  it  must  be  remem- 
bered, far  better  known  to  him  than  the  middle  ages  or 
even  his  own  times  of  which  the  human  story  had  not  yet 
been  spread  in  books  in  anything  like  the  same  degree. 
His  world  of  intelligence  was  substantially  the  classical 
world ;  there  were  the  things  he  knew,  his  intellectual  in- 
terests, his  dominant  mental  memories.  Wlien  he  was 
made,  during  his  Italian  residence,  a  citizen  of  Rome,  an 
honour  that  gave  him  so  much  delight,  no  one  living 
better  deserved  the  title ;  for  he  was  truly  a  citizen  of  that 
eternal  Rome  which  endures  in  the  mind  of  man.  Indeed. 
[  167  ] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
he  had  something  of  what  may  he  called  a  colonial  de- 
pendence on  the  life  of  antiquity,  and  liis  outlook  and 
f(>(.']iiifr  toward  Rome  and  Athens  were  not  unlike  the  at- 
titude  of  the  scholars  of  New  England  toward  London 
and  Paris  in  the  last  century.  He  was  more  at  home  there 
than  in  his  own  age;  his  outward  life  and  action  were  in 
his  own  neighbourhood,  in  the  religious  and  civil  strife 
of  a  province  with  which  he  made  terms  for  the  day  and 
the  hour,  but  the  life  of  his  mind  was  in  the  company  of 
the  antique  world  and  its  affairs.  He  naturally  fell  into 
the  philosophic  attitude  which  prevailed  in  that  ex- 
hausted paganism;  and  from  the  survey  of  the  scene  of 
life  familiar  to  him  out  of  that  Greco-Roman  past  and 
under  the  guidance  of  Roman  thought  that  gave  his 
mind  direction,  he  gathered  that  general  impression  of 
the  feebleness  of  man's  nature  wliich  kept  on  deepening 
with  years  until  it  became  the  master  theme  of  liis  mat- 
ter, and  made  the  famous  "  What  do  I  know  "  the  legend 
of  his  shield  in  literature. 

This  impeachment  of  man's  faculty  for  knowledge 
was  nothing  new.  It  was  made  up  of  a  resume  of  the  rags 
and  scraps  of  those  old  sceptics  in  whom  the  intellect, 
which  had  awakened  in  Greece  and  had  a  long  career, 
found  its  first  disillusionment  in  the  pursuit  of  truth.  It 
had  a  curious  place  in  Montaigne's  day  as  being  the 
complement  of  the  idea  of  the  necessity  of  revealed 
[1C8] 


MONTAIGNE 
truth  miraculously  made  known  to  the  race;  but  it  was 
not  in  that  aspect  that  Montaigne  cared  for  it.  'J'he  fee- 
bleness of  man's  natural  faculty  for  truth  fell  in  with 
Montaigne's  general  convictions  with  regard  to  human 
nature;  it  harmonized  with  the  Epicurean  ease  of  his 
temperament.  The  idea  of  sex,  to  approach  his  philoso- 
phy in  another  way,  was  a  cardinal  interest  in  his  mind. 
He  makes  his  confessions  with  equal  frankness  and 
discretion,  but  with  unconcealed  thought.  He  brings 
no  imagination,  no  romance  to  bear  upon  the  matter; 
he  is  scientific,  naturalistic,  and  unashamed.  As  the 
higher  spirituality,  which  he  leaves  to  the  church,  is 
absent  from  his  philosophy,  the  higher  ethics  is  absent 
from  his  morality.  To  live  with  ease  in  this  world  involves 
concessions  to  established  conditions ;  and  as  Montaigne 
conceded  to  the  church  and  the  state,  he  conceded  also 
to  nature,  and  was  seemingly  as  unaware  of  any  conflict 
in  one  case  more  than  in  another;  this,  it  seemed  to 
him,  was  good  sense,  the  quality  in  which,  in  the  judg- 
ment of  his  readers,  Montaigne  is  more  eminent  than 
any  other  writer.  And,  in  truth,  viewing  the  scene  of  hu- 
man life  in  its  action  and  its  thinking,  apart  from  any 
divine  element,  as  the  stage  of  the  world  where  man  is 
only  man,  and  seeking  its  examples  in  the  confusions  of 
his  own  age  and  in  the  retrospect  of  decadent  and  ex- 
piring Rome,  Montaigne  has  within  these  limits  a  sing- 
[169] 


(;ki:at  whitehs 

ular  gift  for  reasonableness,  for  setting  forth  the  life 
that  the  world  wills,  for  good  sense.  The  weakness  of 
human  nature,  whether  knowing  or  acting,  being  ac- 
cepted as  primary  there  remains  for  Montaigne  only 
the  question  of  an  easy  adjustment  thereto,  of  a  search 
for  "  repose  and  liberty; "  and  such  good  sense  is  the  key. 
In  the  discursive  setting  forth  of  human  hfe  and  na- 
ture under  these  lights  Montaigne  developed  one  great 
virtue,  toleration.  It  isolates  him  in  that  age,  and  does 
him  honour  forever.  A  conviction  of  the  futility  of  human 
faculties  in  the  pursuit  of  truth  carries  with  it  the  sense 
of  uncertainty  in  doctrines  and  induces  a  mood  of  indif- 
ferency  toward  all  tenets,  whereby  the  habit  of  tolera- 
tion becomes  natural;  and,  in  addition,  familiarity  with 
the  diversity  of  human  opinion  and  of  moral  practice, 
that  has  filled  the  world  both  in  antiquity  and  among  the 
newly-found  regions  of  the  earth  gave  him  the  poise  and 
freedom  of  the  travelled  mind,  of  the  man  acquainted 
with  men  and  cities,  of  the  man  detached  from  the  slav- 
ery of  one  environment.  A  classical  education  had  exer- 
cised on  Montaigne  one  of  its  great  freeing  powers;  it 
had  made  him  familiar  with  a  cinlization,  not  specifi- 
cally and  theologically  Christian,  but  of  an  overawing 
type;  it  had  redressed  the  balance  of  ecclesiastical 
prejudice,  and  restored  the  secular  life  to  its  due  pro- 
portions as  a  thing  of  this  world,  of  reason  and  of  nature, 
[170] 


MONTAIGNE 
apart  from  revelation.  In  Montaigne's  case,  indeed,  life 
had  become  essentially  a  purely  secular  affair,  and  he 
considered  it  as  a  moralist  quite  as  if  he  had  been  bom 
in  the  fourth  century  and  remained  unconverted. 
Toleration  was  the  natural  habit  of  a  mind  so  bred, 
and  so  capable  of  entering  into  another  age.  It  may 
have  been  grounded,  if  one  examines  the  matter  curi- 
ously, rather  on  a  kindly  philosophical  contempt  of 
human  nature  than  on  the  doctrine  that  the  way  to 
truth  lies  through  the  conflicts  of  an  untrammelled 
liberty  of  thought  and  speech ;  it  may  not  have  been 
the  toleration  of  a  free  government,  such  as  is  now 
conceived;  but  in  the  days  of  the  religious  wars  and 
at  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century  in  France,  it  was  the 
mark  of  a  singularly  enhghtened  spirit.  The  spectacle  of 
France  at  that  time,  and  the  personal  experience  of  Mon- 
taigne who  had  friends  on  both  sides  of  the  strugghng 
factions,  no  doubt  aided  him,  by  virtue  of  his  repug- 
nance to  the  folly  and  turmoil  of  the  scene,  to  establish 
the  principle  in  himself;  but  it  also  belonged  to  his  con- 
ciliating and  compromising  temperament,  to  his  power 
of  facilitating  life,  to  his  classically  bred  intelligence,  and 
to  his  native  kindliness.  Toleration  was  in  him  a  human 
instinct,  strongly  supported  by  his  knowledge  and  expe- 
rience and  approved  by  his  judgment,  and  not  merely  a 
conclusion  of  philosophy  or  principle  of  government.  He 
[171] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
was  as  singular,  too,  for  his  hatred  of  cruelty.  What  he 
has  to  say  of  torture  in  legal  processes,  of  the  imposi- 
tion of  cruel  punishments,  of  public  executions  and  the 
like  matters,  also  marks  him  out  in  the  age.  He  was  one 
of  those  who  had  become  humane  as  well  as  reasonable 
in  his  converse  with  that  antiquity  which  was  then  infus- 
ing secular  vigour  into  the  blood  of  the  world  as  an  anti- 
dote to  the  ecclesiastical  poisons  that  had  long  corrupted 
free  human  nature.  Yet  in  liis  "  Essays "  there  is  one 
singular  silence.  He  does  not  mention  nor  even  allude  to 
the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew,  which  was  one  of  the 
great  events  of  his  lifetime,  and  by  which  he  must  have 
been  deeply  moved.  It  is  an  indication  of  his  good  sense. 
His  retirement,  after  all,  was  indeed  profound  intellectu- 
ally, in  the  great  round  Tour  de  INIontaigne,  by  the 
Perigord  hills ;  there  he  freely  speculated  and  gossiped 
in  his  learned  way  in  the  still  air  of  delightful  studies; 
but  practically  when  in  the  midst  of  state-affairs,  and 
there  was  question  of  publishing  his  friend  La  Boetie's 
attack  on  "  Monarchy  "  or  of  a  St.  Bartholomew's  Day, 
he  kept  close  mouth.  This  sense  of  contradiction  between 
the  intellectual  and  the  practical  life  is  necessarily  felt  in 
Montaigne;  it  affects  the  sincerity  of  the  man,  for  many 
readers ;  but  it  belongs  to  the  psychology  of  the  conform- 
ist in  every  age.  Montaigne  has  lived  by  his  thought 
rather  than  by  his  life,  and  by  his  privacy  rather  than  by 
[  1-^2  ] 


MONTAIGNE 
his  publicity;  yet  thought  and  Hfe  with  him  moved  with 
singular  intimacy  and  equality;  and  as  his  career,  de- 
spite its  prudencies,  will  be  held  manly,  energetic,  hon- 
ourable and  above  all  wise,  so  his  thought,  despite  its 
reticencies  —  and  they  are  many  and  serious  —  will  be 
held  bold,  free,  advancing  and  again  above  all  wise. 
Repose  and  liberty,  could  he  compass  and  reconcile 
them,  were  a  possession  worth  many  practical  com- 
promises. 

Montaigne's  name,  for  mankind,  is  that  of  the  great 
doubter.  The  modem  spirit,  in  this  one  great  phase  of 
its  manifestation,  may  be  said  to  begin  with  him,  in  lit- 
erature. He  was  not  aware  of  the  career  that  tliis  scep- 
ticism was  to  run,  of  the  deep  reach  and  radiations  of  its 
undermining  power  in  later  days,  agnostic  and  pessimis- 
tic, as  far  as  to  the  base  of  life  itself.  He  did  not  question 
the  worth  of  Ufe;  he  had  found  life  a  pleasant  thing;  but 
he  certainly  doubted  the  worth  of  the  higher  life.  He  re- 
peatedly expresses  the  doubt  that  the  exercise  of  the 
higher  faculties  interferes  with  the  pleasurable  good  of 
life  and  introduces  a  disturbing  element  injurious  to 
human  happiness.  He  makes  that  interrogation  of  civili- 
zation, in  developing  which  Rousseau  found  him  so 
fruitful  a  master.  Montaigne,  merely  as  a  conformist, 
had  eliminated  much  from  life;  and  his  temperament 
led  him  along  that  path  to  a  general  elimination  of  the 
[  173  ] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
nobler  faculties,  the  superior  aims,  the  dangerous  toils 
of  the  ideal,  which  he  knew  rather  by  observation,  seeing 
what  trouble  these  things  brought  upon  the  private  life 
and  public  tranquillity;  and  in  his  view  of  the  world,  the 
life  of  nature,  whether  individually  seen  in  the  poor  and 
humble  or  collectively  in  the  newly-found  savages, 
seemed  possibly  preferable  to  the  types  of  civihzation. 
Perfectibihty  was  an  idea  that  he  did  not  know.  Repose 
and  liberty  were  the  ends  of  life  for  him,  and  weakness 
its  condition;  not  to  impose  too  great  a  burden,  not  to 
accept  too  heavy  a  yoke,  not  to  open  too  distant  a  scope, 
not  to  propose  too  far  a  goal,  rather  to  avoid  the  heights, 
this  was  wisdom.  It  is  the  philosophy  of  one  who  places 
happiness  in  recognition  of  the  limitations  rather  than  in 
cultivation  of  the  energies  of  life;  to  enjoy  life  it  is  most 
needful  not  to  overestimate  its  worth.  Such  a  scheme,  so 
little  exacting  of  force,  is  naturally  crowned  by  the  vir- 
tues of  ease,  by  moderation,  reasonableness,  good-sense, 
the  virtues  of  Montaigne. 

He  was  at  one  with  his  theory;  he  is  its  illustration, 
and  after  all  it  is  himself  and  not  his  theory  that  is  inter- 
esting. The  page  grows  antiquated  and  dull  wnth  out- 
w^om  knowledge  in  proportion  as  the  theory  occupies  it, 
tatters  of  the  past  in  science,  thought  and  scandal;  but  it 
grows  vivid  and  contemporary  as  soon  as  he  puts  him- 
self into  the  sentences.  For  liim  he  is  himself  the  model 
[174] 


MONTAIGNE 

of  life;  the  human  nature  that  he  exhibits  with  such  \i- 
vacity  is  that  with  which  he  has  grown  acquainted  in  his 
own  bosom.  He  tells  piecemeal  in  the  rambhng  method 
of  the  "  Essays  "  all  the  story  of  himself,  his  birth,  educa- 
tion and  career,  what  has  happened  to  him,  what  he  has 
done,  his  tastes  and  habits,  the  secrets  of  his  meals  and 
his  toilet,  the  course  of  his  disease,  the  most  trivial,  the 
most  dubious,  the  most  private  matters;  he  makes  the 
worid  the  familiar  of  his  person,  of  his  mortal  being,  of 
his  quality  of  man.  This  intimacy  which  he  ingenuously 
allows,  as  a  thing  the  most  natural  to  him  in  the  world, 
wins  credence  for  his  sincerity  in  his  intellectual  confes- 
sions, in  his  examination  of  his  thoughts  and  impres- 
sions, in  his  remarks  on  the  ways  of  the  world  that  he 
lived  in;  and  this  sincerity  has  the  appearance  of  being 
absolute.  It  gives  to  his  thought  that  quality  of  echo, 
which  makes  it  seem  the  whisper  of  one's  own  experi- 
ence, the  utterance  of  one's  own  unframed  words.  Mon- 
taigne ingratiates  himself  in  the  bosom  of  the  reader  by  a 
thousand  ways,  but  by  none  more  than  by  this  of  being 
his  spokesman;  it  is  pleasant  to  confess  by  proxy,  to 
let  another  tell  those  truths  of  which  human  nature, 
in  its  tacitness,  is  half -ashamed,  expose  those  half-lies 
which  it  is  reluctant  to  acknowledge  but  of  which  it  is 
aware;  and  it  is  pleasant  to  find  the  philosophy  of  the 
pleasurable,  the  unexigent,  the  not  too  serious,  stated 
[175] 


GREAT  WRITEHS 
with  so  much  unconcern,  and  to  feel  the  compromises  of 
life  take  on  an  aspect  of  such  reasonableness.  It  is  in 
these  things  that  the  personality  of  Montaigne  is  so  at- 
tractive; in  the  Epicurean,  the  Sadducean  moments  of 
life,  in  its  average  actuality  of  living  among  people  of  the 
world,  he  is  good  company;  the  doubt  in  liis  mind  has 
great  pardoning  power,  and  may  contain  indeed  a  gen- 
eral amnesty  for  life. 

In  a  temperament  such  as  Montaigne  shows  in  his  ca- 
reer, his  thought  and  his  personality  there  is  defined  a 
universal  type  of  man,  a  constant  mood  of  the  human 
mind,  a  spirit  of  life  speaking  intelligible  words  to  men 
in  every  reflective  age.  It  is  of  the  fourth  century  or  the 
sixteenth  or  the  twentieth  indifferently.  Its  reality  was 
never  more  vital  than  in  Montaigne,  its  words  never 
more  vivid  than  here;  he  is  by  far  its  best  incarnation. 
The  time  was  ripe  for  a  lukewarm  gospel ;  the  long  tri- 
umph of  fanaticism  was  waning  in  its  last  fierce  excesses ; 
the  hour  of  the  moderates  had  come.  After  ages  of  dog- 
matism, his  unconcerned  "What  do  I  know,"  is  the 
voice  of  a  new  world;  after  centuries  of  spiritual  strain, 
in  every  form  of  fervour  and  travesty,  his  radical  accept- 
ance of  this  world  as  man's  proper  sphere  to  wliich  he 
should  adapt  himself  is  a  welcome  relaxation ;  after  the 
torture,  assassination  and  massacre,  the  turmoil  of  sect 
and  feud,  the  misery  of  warring  faiths,  his  sceptical  tol- 
[176] 


MONTAIGNE 
eration  is  a  truce  of  reason  that  men  might  be  glad  to 
have  on  any  terms.  In  his  works  it  may  seem  hard  to  dis- 
cern the  morning  hghts;  but,  as  happens  in  great  books, 
the  past  and  future  blend  there  with  long  rays.  The  con- 
junction of  his  acutely  alive  mind  with  the  matter  of  an- 
tiquity often  strikes  the  reader  as  a  union  of  the  quick 
with  the  dead ;  but  that  is  an  illusion  due  to  our  own  re- 
laxed hold  on  the  classical  authors.  He  found  the  lettered 
ages  of  Rome  and  Athens  more  modern  than  any  inter- 
vening century,  nearer  to  him  than  his  own  times,  supe- 
rior to  them ;  and  so  it  came  about  that  his  book  involves 
a  great  span  of  time,  and  remembers  Socrates  as  it  fore- 
shadows Rousseau.  In  the  midst  of  all  this  precept  out 
of  Seneca  and  anecdotes  of  the  philosophers'  lives,  there 
is  a  constant  cropping  out  of  the  great  modern  traits  — 
the  free  exercise  of  reason,  the  appeal  to  nature,  the  rest- 
less curiosity,  the  plea  for  toleration  and  humaneness,  the 
interest  in  education,  the  disposition  to  examine  all  things 
anew  and  bring  them  to  the  test  of  practical  reality,  to 
think  out  the  world  afresh.  Montaigne's  modernity  is 
clouded,  too,  no  doubt,  not  only  by  his  antiquarianism, 
but  by  his  attitude  of  ease  toward  life.  It  seems  incon- 
gruous that  one  who  was  so  little  a  reformer  as  he  should 
be  counted  among  the  leaders  of  a  new  age;  but  if  he  did 
not  proselytize  for  a  cause,  he  exemplified  what  is  the 
best  and  profoundest  of  all  reforms,  a  reform  in  the 
[177] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
habit  of  thinking;  he  thought  for  himself.  lie  was  great 
in  independence  of  mind;  whatever  he  thought,  it  was 
his  own.  He  was  great,  too,  in  force  of  character;  what- 
ever he  did  was  his  own.  He  was,  as  has  been  said,  the 
man  of  his  own  choice.  Individuahty  such  as  this  is  an 
undying  ideal;  it  is  superlatively  modem;  and  Mon- 
taigne is  thus  a  great  type  of  the  modem  man,  primarily 
in  the  conduct  of  his  mind,  and  perhaps  also  more  truly 
than  would  readily  be  confessed,  in  the  conduct  of  his 
life.  He  was  not  a  weakhng,  though  his  philosophy  may 
easily  be  mistaken  for  that  of  a  weakhng.  Justly  inter- 
preted, do  not  his  concessions,  compromises,  reticences 
show  strength  of  judgment,  strength  of  good  sense,  pm- 
dence,  which  in  practical  life  often  avail  quite  as  much 
as  strength  of  mere  opinion .'  Nor  was  truth,  of  itself,  a 
large  part  of  hfe  for  Montaigne;  it  was  at  best  an  uncer- 
tainty. He  was  not  a  martyr  of  ideas,  but  he  was  a  man 
of  ideas.  He  spent  several  years  in  collecting,  digesting, 
and  illustrating  these  ideas  in  the  book,  continually  add- 
ing something  to  the  earher  forms,  and  left  there  this 
portrait  of  himself,  body  and  spirit.  The  terms  on  wliich 
he  stands  vdih  liis  reader  are  those  of  friendship,  and  for 
friendship  a  man  must  be  born ;  and  it  must  be  acknowl- 
edged that  not  all  men  are  born  for  friendship  with  such 
a  one  as  he  describes  himself.  There  are  many  who  echo 
Clough's  words  —  "  I  do  not  greatly  think  about  Mon- 
[178] 


MONTAIGNE 
taigne;"  and  Clough  was  classical,  sceptical,  modern, 
but  he  was  serious-minded.  Montaigne  is  not  ajti  author 
for  serious-minded  people,  in  that  sense.  He  has  too 
great  detachment  of  mind,  too  great  insouciance  of  con- 
duct; he  is  in  all  senses  too  free  a  man. 

It  might  seem  that  a  book  which  is  described  as  a  con- 
fession of  hfe,  and  one  in  which  human  nature  finds  it- 
self absolved  in  the  very  bosom  of  the  reader,  is  just  such 
a  one  as  should  appeal  to  grave  persons.  But  Montaigne 
has  not  the  proper  manner  of  the  confessional ;  he  is  gar- 
rulous, not  truly  penitent,  but  rather  scandalously  inter- 
ested in  liis  own  story;  the  confession  of  man's  nature 
has  quite  as  much  the  character  of  an  exposure  of  hfe. 
Certainly  it  is  a  book  of  the  disillusionment.  It  imphes 
immense  experience  of  hving,  of  hfe  long  lived  by  many 
generations  in  many  conditions  and  long  meditated  upon 
by  many  diverse  minds.  It  is  a  book  of  the  mature  hfe, 
and  century-ripened.  The  subhmities,  the  enthusiasms, 
the  heroics  of  hfe  are  not  here;  the  fiery  hopes,  the  stim- 
ulations, the  divine  despairs  —  there  is  nothing  of  that, 
neither  gospel,  nor  rallying-cry  nor  death-challenge. 
These  things  have  long  been.  But  the  man  who  is  ac- 
quainted with  human  nature  in  his  own  breast  and  in 
Uving  men,  who  commands  the  vistas  of  history,  of  liter- 
ature, of  various  philosophies,  who  knows  the  past  issues 
of  human  hopes  and  toils,  the  man  of  experience,  finds  a 
[179] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
certain  ju.stness  in  the  thought  of  Montaigne  tliat  har- 
monizes with  the  latter-day  moods  of  Hfe  and  is  the  more 
acceptable  because  it  is  graced  with  that  h'ghtness  of 
spirit,  that  not  too  serious  view,  that  tone  which  might 
so  easily  become  mocking  and  yet  never  mocks.  Though 
the  herald  of  the  modern  age,  Montaigne  was  deeply  im- 
plicated in  the  past,  in  what  man  has  been.  In  the  "  Es- 
says "  one  finds  the  lees  of  antiquity,  and  somewhat  the 
lees  of  hfe;  it  is  the  book  of  an  old  mind,  of  an  old  man, 
of  a  retirement  from  the  world;  to  read  it  justly,  the 
reader  must  have  Hved.  Montaigne  requires  an  after- 
noon light,  and  a  mind  content  ^vith  the  private  Hfe, 
with  reason  and  nature  and  good  sense. 


[180] 


Great  Writers 

VI 


SHAKSPERE 


The  primary  tiling  in  Shakspere  was  his  sense  of  action. 
He  seized  all  life  as  action  in  his  thoughts ;  he  led  his  own 
life  as  action  in  himself,  as  a  career.  That  is  his  Eng- 
hshry.  He  was  a  practical  man;  as  a  boy  he  was  enter- 
prising, in  his  maturity  he  was  discreet.  The  traditions 
of  his  early  days  at  Stratford  show  a  lively,  capable, 
eager  youth,  active,  adventurous,  expedient,  quick  to  get 
into  trouble,  quick  in  marriage;  and  the  flight  from 
Stratford  was  a  departure  into  the  large  scene  of  life,  a 
going  to  London,  to  the  field  of  ambition.  The  family 
had  seen  better  days,  and  was  in  difficulties ;  he  meant  to 
bear  up  the  name;  he  succeeded,  in  the  end,  in  re-estab- 
lishing the  family  estate  in  his  native  place.  The  tradi- 
tions of  his  early  days  in  London  show  the  same  funda- 
mental temperament;  he  had  no  scorn  of  beginnings, 
whether  he  held  horses  at  the  theatre,  or  by  whatever 
door  of  trifling  service  he  entered  on  the  great  scene  that 
[183] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
was  to  be  his  kingdom,  he  would  get  in  where  he  could; 
he  accepted  the  terms  on  whidi  life  wa-s  to  be  led  in  his 
time  and  place.  He  learned  easily  because  he  was  facile 
to  receive;  he  learned  much  because  he  put  what  he 
knew  to  use  as  soon  as  he  knew  it;  he  was  quick  to  ex- 
periment with  his  faculties  and  what  they  found  to  work 
with.  The  stage  was  developing  comedy  and  tragedy  and 
a  verbal  style  proper  to  display  them ;  there  was  a  stock 
of  plays  rapidly  outgrown,  a  public  demand  to  be  met, 
money  to  be  made.  He  made  himself  apprentice  to  the 
best  masters  of  comedy  and  tragedy,  he  tried  his  hand  at 
re-making  the  old  plays,  he  used  what  he  found  on  the 
stage,  adding  what  he  could  of  prettiness  and  quibble,  of 
grace  and  softness  in  the  phrase,  of  heat  and  vivacity  in 
the  dialogue,  of  golden  cadence,  comic  play,  tragic 
thrust;  and  gradually  he  moved  forward,  emerged,  be- 
came playwright  and  poet,  the  mark  of  passing  and  im- 
potent malice,  popular  wnth  the  many,  well-beloved  by 
his  comrades,  successful.  If  the  historj'^  of  these  days 
were  known  in  detail,  it  would  not  differ  from  the  great 
type  shown  in  Scott,  Cervantes;  infinite  interest  in  life, 
unceasing  industry  in  work,  the  power  to  Uve  which 
makes  men  great,  and  with  it  the  apparent  unconscious- 
ness of  genius,  the  reality  of  the  indi^'idual  fife,  the  near 
regard  to  the  private  good.  TMiatever  else  there  may 
have  been,  the  theatre  was  to  Shakspere  a  profession,  a 
[184] 


SHAKSPERE 
career;  he  made  himself  master  and  head  of  it  by  the 
toilsome  process  of  daily  life;    and    he    measured  his 
success  in  it,  in  one  way  at  least,  by  the  substance  of  what 
it  brought  him,  wealth,  position,  a  county  name. 

At  London,  where  he  led  this  career  for  twenty-five 
years,  he  had  complete  worldly  success.  His  hfe  there 
leaves  two  impressions  on  the  mind.  The  first  is  that 
of  immense  labour,  not  only  in  the  composition  of  the 
plays,  but  in  the  other  necessary  business  of  the  stage 
and  management,  the  acting,  the  preparation,  the  pro- 
vincial tours,  the  court  performances,  the  life  of  the 
theatre  and  its  finances,  the  practical  realities;  it  must 
have  been  a  very  busy  life,  and  its  wearing  effects  are 
plain  in  the  rapid  and  deep  maturing  of  his  manhood, 
and  in  his  comparatively  early  death.  The  second  impres- 
sion is  of  the  ease,  quiet  and  friendliness  of  his  temper- 
ament, his  companionableness  and  his  reserve,  a  human 
and  noble  nature ;  the  characteristic  epithets  given  him 
that  have  survived  from  his  friends'  Ups  are  the  two 
words  "gentle  "  and  "  sweet " ;  though  a  few  ill-natured 
phrases  were  flung  at  him,  he  escaped  with  the  highest 
good-fortune  the  venom  that  the  hterary  hfe  vents  even 
on  its  favourites.  He  was  helpful;  in  his  youth  he  be- 
friended Jonson,  and  in  later  years  he  collaborated  with 
younger  men.  His  comrades  of  the  theatre  show  him  that 
wholesome  loyalty  which  mixes  respect  and  affection  so 
[185] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
that  tlicy  are  indistinguishable.  He  seems  to  have  had  by 
nature  those  unconscious,  intimate,  incommunicable 
traits  that  oftenest  come  only  from  breeding  and  make 
men  free  of  the  society  where  they  are.  Young  South- 
ampton was  not  only  his  patron,  but  his  friend;  and  in 
that  difficult  role  of  poet  and  patron  Shakspere  was 
proud  and  happy  in  his  noble  friend,  and  gave  the  trib- 
ute of  affectionate  compUment  in  verse  and  that  glory 
of  style  that  lies  in  courtly  hyberbole,  and  all  that  was 
due  from  the  greatest  of  poets,  but  he  gave  his  heart  also. 
Shakspere  accepted  the  conditions  of  the  hterary  hfe 
with  respect  to  rank  and  fortune  in  his  day  as  simply  as 
he  met  the  state  of  the  theatre.  It  is  hkely  there  was  no 
better  courtier  when  he  went  to  court,  as  it  is  Ukely  that 
there  was  no  better  buyer  when  he  went  to  view  lands 
and  houses,  no  better  judge  of  the  public  taste  in  plays. 
He  was  equal  to  the  business  of  hfe  on  all  sides  that  re- 
quired worldly  abihty,  and  temperamentally  as  equal  to 
it  in  the  tilings  of  affection  and  comraderv',  of  the 
heart,  of  humanity  in  social  intercourse.  The  patron,  the 
mortgage  belong  in  liis  life,  together  with  the  scores  of 
friends  and  the  innumerable  affairs  to  do;  they  are 
naturally  there,  for  he  was  a  man  hke  others  who  Uved 
the  common  hfe  of  man,  earned  and  ate  liis  bread  in  it, 
and  to  whom  this  action  of  life  in  and  about  and  for  him- 
self was  a  very  palpable  thing.  It  is  not  a  Ufe  that  has 
[186] 


SHAKSPERE 
left  much  record  of  itself,  not  diversified  by  adventure, 
not  the  scene  of  known  passions ;  but  the  golden  silences 
that  lie  like  autumn  mould  upon  his  memory  are  in  har- 
mony with  that  thought  which  discovers  there  a  life, 
dedicated  indeed  to  the  creative  dream,  but  yet  within  the 
limitations  of  its  own  world  distinguished  by  daily  labour 
and  daily  kindhness,  not  too  self-conscious,  storing  up 
provision  for  the  future,  respect  from  the  world,  the 
affection  of  friends,  the  things  that  should  accompany 
old  age  —  a  Hfe  well-lived,  well-acted,  in  its  earthly 
lines.  Such  a  life  is  consistent  with  the  highest  genius 
even  in  men  in  whom  the  sense  of  life  as  action  is  not  so 
supreme  as  it  was  in  Shakspere ;  in  him  it  was  born  of 
that  genius  where  everything  set  with  a  great  tide  toward 
reality. 

Action  is  the  core  of  the  drama;  it  is  what  gives  at- 
tractive and  arresting  power  to  the  word  "  dramatic, " 
focuses  the  attention,  makes  the  eye  look  and  the  spirit 
expect  at  the  fall  of  those  syllables.  To  Shakspere,  in  his 
youth,  immersed  and  absorbed  in  the  dramatic  move- 
ment that  made  a  captive  servant  of  him,  mind,  moods, 
energy,  ambition,  hope  —  that  overmastered  him  with 
what  was  to  be  his  fate  therein,  life  was  the  object  of  his 
thoughts,  but  life  primarily  as  a  story.  The  story  of  life 
was  there  before  him  in  the  old  plays  on  the  stage,  in  the 
books  he  read,  in  the  tales  he  thumbed  over;  at  first  a 
[187] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
story  of  Englisli  Kings  and  Italian  lovers,  of  the  convul- 
sions of  state,  heart-break  and  the  words  of  downs, 
comic  confusions,  tragic  discords,  enchanted  woodlands. 
He  found  the  chronicle  plays  in  vogue,  fragments  of 
history;  and  here  and  there,  beginning  his  art,  he  re- 
established a  scene,  heightened  a  dialogue,  concentrated 
a  passion  of  anger  or  pity ;  it  was  piecemeal  work  by 
which  he  came  to  the  power  at  last  of  defining  a  plot,  a 
play  of  his  own,  an  interpretation  and  representation  of 
the  story  in  a  way  of  his  own.  The  material  he  used  was 
external,  given  to  liim,  persons  and  incidents ;  he  did  not 
invent  them,  he  found  them;  and  his  manipulation  of 
them  at  first  was,  naturally,  mainly  in  the  language,  the 
verbal  investiture  of  person,  act,  scene,  that  part  of  the 
work  which  was  most  flexible,  most  plastic,  readiest  for 
a  youthful  hand  and  most  tempting  for  lips  that  had 
suddenly  unlocked  a  flood  of  such  poesy,  eloquence  and 
passion  in  speech,  colours  of  nature  and  the  heart,  as 
had  never  before  poured  from  an  English  fount.  It  is  tliis 
flow  of  language,  vehement  or  smooth  or  impassioned, 
reflecting  natural  beauty  o.  personal  graces,  prone  to 
pathos  and  sentiment,  rhetorical,  dragging  along  \\-ith  it 
all  the  affectations  of  the  hour,  experimenting  with,  its 
own  powers,  intoxicated  with  its  own  poetrj',  exuberant 
with  its  own  life  —  it  is  this  marvellously  musical,  facile, 
intellectual  power  of  language,  this  mastery  that  is  not 
[188] 


SHAKSPERE 
merely  verbal,  but  is  of  the  essence  of  expression,  poetic 
not  purely  dramatic  —  it  is  this  that  in  the  earlier  works 
plays  over  the  story,  atmospheres  it,  inhabits  it,  and  in 
its  surplus  of  light,  feehng  and  imagery,  in  its  lyrical 
effusion,  overflows  without  submerging  the  dramatic  in- 
terest, threatens  the  eminence  of  the  action.  From 
"Love's  Labour's  Lost"  to  "A  Midsummer  Night's 
Dream,"  this  lyrical  obsession  mounts  prevaihng; 
thereafter  it  recedes  —  the  tints  of  the  morning,  the 
bloom  of  spring,  the  hour  of  the  bloom  of  hfe  had  passed. 
Shakspere,  loosing  the  passion  of  language  to  the  full  as 
never  English  poet  did,  had  not  lost  his  foothold  on  the 
reahty  of  Hfe,  on  the  story,  the  drama,  the  action;  and, 
deepening  in  his  dramatic  faculty  he  came,  in  the  end,  to 
that  subtile  mastery  of  language  which  belongs  only  to 
the  greatest  genius,  lords  of  the  brief  and  broken  phrase. 
Four  words  created  hght;  and  something  of  that  same 
miracle  lingers  in  the  power  of  the  poet  who  is  truly  di- 
vine. The  gradual  victory  of  dramatic  over  purely  poetic 
diction  in  Shakspere  reflects  the  victory  of  life  itself,  of 
the  action  over  the  illusion  of  life,  in  him. 

There  was  a  second  rivalry  with  the  dramatic  instinct 
in  Shakspere  besides  this  of  the  lyrical  impulse.  It  lay  in 
the  intellectual  temptation,  the  power  of  the  naked 
thought.  What  is  technically  called  the  sentiment,  that  is, 
the  wise  saying,  the  axiomatic  verse  in  which  the  re- 
[189] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
fleeting  mind  is  eondensed  with  a  purely  intelleetual 
value,  was  an  inheritance  of  the  drama  from  old  time; 
and  Shakspere,  particularly  in  his  middle  life,  was  apt  at 
linking  such  counsels  together  or  in  developing  them 
from  the  dialogue.  It  is  an  analogous  faculty  that  he  cm- 
ploys  in  those  wit-combats  of  the  characters  that  are  pre- 
eminently intellectual  in  tone.  The  wit  of  Rosahnd  and 
Beatrice  is  more  closely  united  to  the  dialogue;  but  in  the 
passages  of  adAace,  from  Biron's  gentle  sermon  on  love 
to  the  sage  wisdom  of  Polonius  and  Ulysses,  and  even 
on  to  Prospero's  great  farewell  there  is  a  recurring  in- 
terruption of  the  action  in  play  after  play,  due  to  the 
emergence  of  thought  in  control  of  the  scene;  and  as 
Shakspere's  lyricism  gives  to  the  plays  that  atmosphere 
which  isolates  them  among  the  works  of  dramatic 
genius  and  sets  them  apart  in  an  unapproached  realm  of 
creative  art,  so  his  wisdom  gives  to  them  that  intellec- 
tual dilatation  by  which  they  excel  all  others  in  majesty 
of  mind.  Other  dramatists  have  represented  hfe  ^\-ith 
equal  impressiveness  in  its  being,  but  none  have  repre- 
sented life  so  conscious  of  its  own  significance.  Here 
again,  as  in  his  lyrical  moment,  Shakspere  in  his  intel- 
lectual moment  seems  to  depart  from  the  stor}-,  the 
drama,  the  action,  but  he  does  not  really  depart,  or  if  he 
does  so  it  is  only  to  bring  back  to  the  drama  the  offerings 
of  all  the  Muses.  And  in  a  third  tributary  element  of 
[190] 


SHAKSPERE 
the  drama,  in  the  spectacle,  while  he  uses  the  embellish- 
ment of  the  scene  to  the  full  measure  of  what  his  times 
allowed,  he  introduces  the  masque  as  an  adjunct,  like  a 
song  or  a  dance,  harmonious  with  the  scene  but  not  an 
essential  of  the  action.  These  three  things,  then,  diction, 
sentiment  and  spectacle,  which  were  the  open  tempta- 
tion to  woo  him  from  the  essential  dramatic  point  of 
view,  the  action,  he  either  overcame  or  successfully  sub- 
dued them  to  the  enrichment  and  enlargement  of  the 
action;  the  main  drift  of  his  art,  the  main  purpose  of  his 
mind  were  the  same,  with  whatever  slackening  or  bend- 
ing of  the  current,  toward  the  story  of  Hfe  pre-eminently, 
toward  character  and  event,  toward  reality  in  its  most 
human  form.  Beginning  with  the  more  intractable  ma- 
terial of  history,  he  came  to  use  preferably  romantic 
story  in  which  his  imagination  was  more  free  in  creative 
power;  and  in  the  end,  to  such  a  height  did  this  power 
reach  that  he  seemed  to  create  not  only  character  and 
event,  but  also  the  world  in  which  they  had  their  being; 
to  such  a  complete  victory  did  his  dramatic  instinct,  pre- 
vaiUng  over  all  other  impulses,  carry  him  who  always  re- 
mained at  heart  a  dramatist. 

Shakspere  was  so  completely  a  dramatist,  interested 
in  the  action  of  Ufe,  that  when  he  took  the  autobio- 
graphical mask  in  the  "  Sonnets  "  he  seems  transformed 
into  his  opposite,  into  the  lyrical  poet  unlocking  his  own 
[191] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
heart;  here,  it  has  been  believed,  he  told  his  dearest  se- 
crets, his  intimacies,  the  most  sweet  and  bitter  disgraces 
of  his  days  and  nights,  his  springs  and  autumns;  and  so 
inspired  is  the  dramatic  action  of  liis  mind  in  this  play  in 
the  forms  of  the  sonnet,  if  it  be  such,  that  it  is  only  by  an 
effort  of  detachment,  by  reflection  and  judgment,  that 
one  sees  there  only  the  working  of  that  supreme  faculty 
under  the  appearances  of  personality.  The  secret  of  the 
"Sonnets"  has  been  so  many  times  discovered,  and  es- 
caped in  the  discovery,  that  this  view,  now  best  sup- 
ported, may  justly  have  its  lease  of  life  in  turn,  and 
the  physical  basis  of  fact  on  which  the  poet's  imag- 
ination worked  —  such  strands  and  suggestions  of  ac- 
tuality as  he  used  in  the  romances  —  may  be  found  in 
Southampton's  personahty ;  but  the  black  lady,  the  dear, 
disloyal  friend,  the  rival  poet  will  still  wear  in  their  faces, 
have  in  their  form  and  moving,  an  insoluble  mystery, 
because,  whatever  the  drama,  they  move  in  a  cloud  of 
lyricism,  intense  vrith  tenderness,  sorrow,  unavailing 
cries,  that  here  all  seems  the  form  and  substance  of  the 
soul  itself.  A  dramatist  who  makes  his  own  soul  the 
scene  of  the  drama,  using  the  forms  of  personality,  must 
necessarily  leave  a  mysterious  work;  but  in  the  "Son- 
nets "  what  is  plain  is  the  drama,  what  is  obscure  is  only 
the  basis  of  the  drama,  whether  it  be  fact  or  convention, 
or  mingled  of  both;  whatever  be  the  personal  element,  it 
[192] 


SHAKSPERE 
is  conceived,  handled,  developed  dramatically,  its  truth 
is  at  bottom  dramatic  truth. 

And  if  it  be  difficult  to  trace  Shakspere's  personality 
with  any  assured  steps  in  the  "  Sonnets, "  how  much  less 
is  it  to  be  probed  in  the  plays  proper!  Those  attempts 
that  have  been  made  to  correlate  the  bare  facts  of  his 
liistory  with  the  sequence  of  his  works,  to  synchronize  his 
Ufe-moods  ^\ath  the  comedies  and  the  tragedies,  to  make 
the  plays  render  up  the  spiritual  states  of  the  man  in  his 
personal  being,  are  ingenious ;  but  the  conditions  of  pro- 
duction, when  Ehzabeth  might  ask  any  day  for  a  "  Mer- 
ry Wives  of  Windsor, "  or  some  noble  family  desire  a  hy- 
meneal spectacle  hke  "  A  INIidsummer  Night's  Dream, " 
or  James  be  pleased  with  a  Scotch  theme,  or  the  public 
itself,  httle  indulgent  to  the  moods  of  those  who  pro- 
vide entertainment,  might  have  to  be  recaptured  to  the 
play  —  such  conditions  are  httle  favourable  to  "  pe- 
riods "  of  the  private  soul.  The  chronology  of  the  works, 
too,  is  not  convincing.  Did  Shakspere,  in  whose  mind  the 
perspective  of  life  varied  no  more  than  the  perspective  of 
the  heavens  in  the  celestial  telescope,  think  to  have  all 
that  world  of  his  courtesy  to  his  private  fortunes  in  a 
son's  death,  a  friend's  fall,  a  mistress's  fickle  change  .'* 
Shakspere  was  of  the  objective  type  of  genius,  a  trite  but 
useful  phrase  for  a  very  palpable  fact.  He  never  mistook 
his  soul  for  the  soul  of  the  universe.  He  passed,  as  other 
[193] 


GREAT  WRITEKS 

men,  from  youth  to  manhood,  and  the  deepening  of  liis 
nature  in  tiie  process,  as  it  was  worked  out  under  the 
control  of  absorption  in  creative  dramatic  art  is  plainly 
discerned;  he  seized  Ufe  in  its  action  more  logically, 
more  ideally,  more  profoundly;  he  compassed  and  pen- 
etrated and  filled  it  with  omnipresent  thought;  height 
and  depth,  passion  and  fate  and  gloom,  he  laid  it  bare; 
he  saw  it.  He  passed  through  the  disillusionment;  but  it 
was  a  disillusionment  not  of  the  suffering  heart,  but  of 
the  seeing  eye;  and  after  the  disillusionment  came, 
what  comes  to  all,  the  lassitude,  the  indifference,  the  re- 
pose, the  relaxed  sense  of  fate,  the  concession  to  opti- 
mism, the  fantastic  world;  the  calm  of  Shakspere  was  the 
subsidence  of  hfe  in  liim,  the  smoothing  of  the  great 
wave  of  passion,  the  stilling  of  the  tumultuous  voices  of 
thought. 

Such  a  history  he  had,  in  whatever  special  forms  of 
personal  feeling;  it  is  the  normal  life  of  great  genius,  ab- 
sorbing imaginatively  the  passion  and  thought  of  life  in 
the  world;  and  from  time  to  time,  out  of  this  continuing 
personal  reaction  on  hfe  in  normal  growth  there  would 
proceed  modifying  influences,  hnes  of  choice  in  subject, 
of  intellectual  direction,  of  creative  mood,  passional  har- 
monies blending  with  the  given  theme  —  to  such  a  point 
temperament  would  have  its  will,  more  or  less,  with  the 
work  according  to  time  and  circumstances;  but  such  a 

[194] 


SHAKSPERE 
continuing  and  aging  mood  attendant  on  the  plays  is  a 
far  different  thing  from  "  periods  "  determinative  of  the 
type  of  the  plays  in  a  sequence  which  makes  them  pro- 
ceed from  Shakspere's  personal  fortunes  as  a  mortal 
spirit  with  changes  from  cheerfulness  to  gloom  and  again 
to  equanimity.  Shakspere  was  a  dramatist  by  nature  as 
well  as  by  profession,  or  he  became  subdued  to  what  he 
worked  in;  he  was  the  servant  of  the  public;  and,  much 
more,  he  was  fascinated  by  life  in  its  externality,  life  as 
it  was  in  other  men,  other  times,  other  places;  he  was  in- 
satiate in  informing  himself  of  its  story  in  history,  in 
novels  and  romances,  in  ancient  and  modern  authors, 
wherever  it  was  to  be  found.  He  was  not  that  egotist  who 
writes  himself  large  and  calls  that  the  world ;  art  in  him 
was  not  self-revealing,  it  was  the  revelation  of  a  world 
that  had  been  from  the  foundation  of  being  and  would 
continue  when  his  works  were  buried  deeper  than  any 
plummet  could  sound.  This  objectivity,  this  self-efface- 
ment in  art,  this  interest  in  the  story  of  life,  this  absorp- 
tion in  life's  movement,  in  action,  is  Shakspere's  gift  of 
greatness.  It  explains  his  limitations.  Spirituality, 
properly  speaking,  the  celestial  immortality  of  man's 
nature,  is  not  found  in  Shakspere  either  in  character, 
thought  or  aspiration.  The  religious  life  sleeps  in  his 
works ;  and  many  a  generation  will  marvel  at  it.  He  was 
interested  in  life,  the  action  of  life;  and  that  is  a  thing 
[195] 


GHKAT  WRITERS 
confined  to  tliis  world.  He  is  mundane,  secular,  in  a  way 
scientific;  he  saw  the  spectacle  as  it  is  in  time. 

The  second  main  consideration  bearing  on  Shaks- 
pere's  genius  is  the  fact  that  the  world  he  saw,  dealt  with 
and  knew  was  an  aristocratic  world.  It  was  given  to  hira 
first  historically,  in  those  chronicles  in  which  his  hand 
learned  to  mould  the  human  stuff,  a  kingly  world  of  the 
Henrys,  the  Richards  and  John,  with  feudal  challenge, 
battle  incidents,  the  life  of  the  council,  murders  in  pris- 
ons or  on  the  block,  treasons,  dethronements,  the  sor- 
rows of  queens,  Norfolk,  Hotspur  and  Falconbridge ;  a 
life  focussed  on  aristocratic  fortunes  and  pivoted  on  aris- 
tocratic power.  To  Shakspere  the  people  was  always  the 
mob,  and  negligible.  The  sphere  of  humour,  too,  in  which 
the  vulgar  enters,  is  dependent  on  the  aristocratic  sphere 
from  the  comedy  of  the  camp-fire  and  the  tavern  to  Bot- 
tom's craftsmen  and  the  court  clowns,  up  to  Lear's  Fool. 
Later,  the  Roman  plays  gave  him  the  same  aristocratic 
state  in  an  antique  form,  dictatorial,  imperial,  with  the 
mob  of  citizens  though  more  in  evidence,  more  con- 
temptible. The  ordered  world  for  him  was  the  world  of 
courtly  Ufe;  all  else,  though  contiguous  or  entering  in  for 
entertainment  or  service  or  in  the  mass  of  battle,  was  es- 
sentially subordinated,  exteriorized,  as  environment. 
The  romances,  which,  after  the  chronicles,  had  given 
him  the  raw  material,  reinforced  his  conception  of  life 
[lOG] 


SHAKSPERE 
as  an  aristocratic  structure  by  expanding  it  socially  into  a 
community  of  gentle-folk,  Venetian,  Veronan,  Paduan, 
in  Arden,  Attica,  lUyria,  or  on  French  or  English  mead- 
ows ;  a  hfe  where  everything  breathed  civiUty,  the  senti- 
ment of  high  breeding  in  chivalry  and  courtesy,  the  cult 
of  phrase,  the  dress  and  behaviour,  the  interests,  ambi- 
tions, intrigues,  recreations,  language,  manners  and  cus- 
toms of  an  aristocratic  ideal.  Even  in  those  regions  of  the 
imagination,  where  he  reared  his  own  state  in  its  lordhest 
form,  with  the  effect  of  an  incantation  of  genius,  in  the 
EngHsh  realm  of  Lear,  the  Scotch  court  of  Macbeth,  the 
throne  of  Denmark,  the  Venetian  principahty  of  Cyprus, 
the  Egypt  of  Antony,  or  in  the  woods  of  Cymbeline,  the 
country-side  of  Perdita,  the  island-kingdom  of  Prospero, 
he  impressed  upon  it  aristocracy  in  its  most  majestic, 
noble  and  gentle  forms  as  the  seal  of  its  being.  Shaks- 
pere's  genius  is,  in  fact,  the  finest  flower  of  the  aristo- 
cratic ideal  of  life. 

Aristocracy  is,  in  a  sense,  the  state  of  nature  histori- 
cally developed  in  society  as  the  survival  of  the  fittest  in 
the  selfish  struggle  for  existence.  Shakspere  received  it  as 
the  past  of  the  world,  contained  in  the  forms  of  history 
and  romance,  the  life  that  had  always  been,  in  which  the 
masses,  held  in  economic  slavery  under  whatever  name, 
furnished  that  wealth  monopoHzed  by  the  nobles  which 
gave  these  latter  liberty  of  the  higher  sphere  of  Hfe,  the 
[197] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
sphere  of  intelligence,  ambition,  art,  where  they  were 
enfranchised  and  armed  for  the  possession  of  the  cliief 
goods  of  life.  Aristocracy,  so  based  on  the  enforced 
tribute  of  mankind,  naturally  develops  individuahty, 
the  open  career  for  those  who  are  in  command  of  wealth, 
opportunity,  leisure;  it  spreads  the  scene  for  strong  na- 
tures, highly  endowed,  superfluous  in  vital  force  and  sel- 
fish desire;  it  is  the  breeding  place  of  human  greatness  of 
the  positive,  self-assertive,  world-conquering  kind. 
Shakspere  received  this  aristocratic  ideal  from  the  times 
in  which  life  had  been  great,  from  the  Greek,  Roman, 
EngUsh  periods;  but  he  received  it  also  at  a  peculiarly 
fortunate  moment  in  the  special  movement  of  its  histori- 
cal development;  he  received  it  when  the  coarser,  denser 
forms  of  mihtary  and  tyrannic  power,  of  feudalism, 
monarchy  and  dogma,  were  dissohing  in  the  finer, 
milder,  freer  modes  of  rationahsm,  individuality,  cul- 
ture; he  received  it  at  a  culminating  moment  of  its  excel- 
lence —  from  the  Itahan  Renaissance. 

Personality,  the  essential  fruit  of  aristocracy,  the 
crowning  victory  of  nature  in  working  out  her  will,  came 
forth  from  the  Itahan  Renaissance  in  one  of  its  highest 
forms,  the  form  of  superb  personal  power.  The  idea  is  so 
native  to  Italy  and  has  played  so  great  a  part  in  her  his- 
tory that  it  seems  racial  —  a  race-element  in  her  great- 
ness. It  was  then  concentrated  in  the  ideal  of  the 
[198] 


SHAKSPERE 
Renaissance  prince,  whether  as  a  pattern  in  Machiavelli, 
or  as  an  illustration  from  history  in  the  nobles  and 
leaders  of  the  Italian  cities ;  but  stripped  to  its  essentials 
it  is  no  more  than  the  individual  will  to  live,  the  domi- 
nance of  that  will,  the  ideal  of  conquering  the  world  to 
oneself,  of  subduing  life,  of  having  one  's  way,  one's  will, 
one's  desire,  of  the  assertion  of  the  power  to  live  that  is 
the  thirst  of  great  souls.  The  aristocratic  ideal  of  life  in 
the  Italian  Renaissance  developed  in  the  central  line  of 
its  advance  in  history  this  idea  of  the  dominance  of  the 
personal  will  in  life,  the  prepotency  of  individuality ;  and 
in  so  doing  it  freed  human  faculty,  energy  and  desire  in  a 
way  and  to  a  degree  wliich  gave  to  Italy  its  brilhant  period 
of  many-sided  genius  and  impelled  the  human  spirit  in 
every  civihzed  country  and  recaptured  the  lost  provinces 
of  Rome  to  the  dominion  of  a  spiritual  civilization  the  seat 
of  whose  power  is  in  the  ideals  of  men.  The  Renaissance 
was  so  great  a  movement.  Though  not  a  material  con- 
quest, it  was  vaster  in  control  than  that  of  Alexander  or 
of  the  elder  antique  Rome.  Shakspere  took  its  full  im- 
pact, hved  in  it,  fed  on  it,  absorbed  its  passions,  its  prin- 
ciples, its  being,  became  its  spirit  in  the  North,  was  its 
transcendent  and  overwhelming  genius  in  literature,  its 
greatest  monument  in  time.  This  is  Shakspere's  position ; 
he  was  the  flower  of  the  aristocratic  ideal  of  life ;  he  was 
the  crest  of  the  Renaissance ;  he  was  the  incarnate  spirit 
[199] 


CHEAT  WRITERS 
of  that  mighty  power  of  hfe  to  hve  mightily  whic  li  belongs 
to  the  aristocratic  ideal  as  a  right  of  nature  and  was  the 
passion  of  the  Renaissance  in  history. 

The  drama,  it  must  be  borne  in  mind,  was  always  a 
European  art.  Shakspere's  universality,  which  is  often 
made  the  occasion  of  so  much  marvel,  is  in  its  origins 
closely  connected  with  tliis  fact.  The  early  English 
drama,  with  its  miracle-plays,  moralities,  school-come- 
dies, Senecan  imitations,  displayed  cosmopolitan  traits 
and  originals  belonging  to  a  common  mental  culture  and 
a  general  artistic  condition;  and  the  Elizabethan  drama, 
in  its  Shaksperian  culmination,  though  locally  English, 
proceeded  out  of  the  European  mind,  its  general  past, 
its  ideas,  principles,  moods,  its  order  of  hfe,  its  accumu- 
lation of  sentiment  and  romance,  its  forms  of  imagina- 
tion; and  in  this  Shakspere  from  an  early  point  in  his 
career  was  more  deeply  imbued  than  any  of  his  contem- 
poraries. What,  then,  constituted  the  European  mind, 
its  intellectual  memory  and  moral  passion,  its  concep- 
tion and  ideal  of  hfe,  its  poetic  culture  and  means  of  art, 
was  more  variously,  richly  and  profoundly  present  and 
active  in  him  than  in  any  other  writer.  He  may  never 
have  been  out  of  England ;  but  he  was  the  most  European 
author  then  hving.  It  is  not  an  accident  that  on  his  stage 
locality  ceases  to  exist.  Italy  has  her  immortahty  in  the 
drama  more  in  Shakspere  than  in  her  own  Uterature. 
[200] 


SHAKSPERE 
"  Hamlet "  is  the  chief  hterary  monument  of  Denmark. 
This  does  not  happen  by  the  caprice  of  an  individual, 
but  marks  that  quaUty  in  Shakspere  by  virtue  of  which 
he  is  the  genius  of  Europe.  The  human  spirit,  from  time 
to  time,  detaches  from  the  world  of  known  geography  a 
country  of  its  own  lying  apart,  a  land  for  itself;  such  was 
Arcadia,  in  which  Sidney  and  others  wandered;  such 
was  the  region  of  chivalry  where  Spenser  and  others 
traversed  the  romantic  scene ;  and  such  was  the  realm  of 
Shakspere's  stage,  the  magic  circle  where  none  dared 
tread  but  he.  It  was  a  world  abstracted  from  the  great 
scene  of  Ufe  in  Europe  as  it  then  lay  before  the  thoughts 
of  men,  in  its  breadth  out  of  the  historic  past,  in  its  va- 
riety of  Uving  energy,  its  mediaeval  and  classic  garniture, 
its  Renaissance  luminousness,  space,  vivacity;  it  was 
this  scene  of  the  European  consciousness  of  what  hfe  had 
been  and  was,  ideahzed  and  generahzed,  and  made  to 
issue  in  poetry  with  the  power  and  brilUancy  of  a  new 
creation,  the  realm  of  Shakspere's  art.  The  aristocratic 
ideal  of  hfe  is  its  organic  principle  and  determines  the 
quality  of  the  scene,  the  nature  of  the  event,  the  impulse 
of  the  characters ;  all  the  flowering  of  phrase  and  fancy, 
of  sentiment  and  passion,  all  the  adornment  of  taste  in 
whatever  form,  all  that  constitutes  mood,  temperament 
and  atmosphere,  is  representative  of  the  European 
fashion  of  courtliness,  scholarship,  art,  the  reverie  and 
[201] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
dream  that  belong  to  the  Renaissance  characteristically, 
its  pastoral,  dramatic,  rhetorical  modes,  its  vari-col- 
oured  romanticism;  but,  most  cardinal  of  all,  what  is 
the  mainspring  of  its  life,  is  the  human  force  loosed  in  it, 
that  prepotency  of  the  individual,  that  dominance  of  the 
personal  will,  which  was  the  master-spirit  of  the  Ren- 
aissance everywhere  and  finds  in  Shakspere's  world  the 
place  of  its  great  career.  This  is  not  a  local,  a  national,  an 
English  thing;  it  is  a  world-idea,  and  the  imagination  of 
Shakspere,  mastered  by  its  inspiration  found  any  coun- 
try a  fit  stage  for  it  in  that  environment  of  an  ideal 
courtly  life  which  was  also  not  local  or  provincial,  but  a 
great  world-scene.  Shakspere's  universality  in  matter 
goes  back  to  the  fact  that  he  was  never  anything  else  but 
cosmopolitan,  in  the  nature  of  his  knowledge, 
the  ideaUty  of  his  art,  the  sources,  compass  and  il- 
lustrative power  of  liis  dramatic  work.  What  is  most  con- 
temporary, realistic  and  locally  English  in  tliis  work  is 
on  its  fringes;  in  its  beginnings  and  interludes,  sub- 
ordinate; in  proportion  as  the  work  becomes  great, 
profound,  comprehensive,  it  possesses  more  purely  the 
European  character,  it  develops  ideal  freedom,  it  be- 
longs not  to  Italy  or  Denmark  or  England,  but  to  the 
genius  of  Europe. 

The  dawn  of  the  Renaissance  spirit,  incarnating  itself 
in  English  dramatic  poetry,  was  in  Marlowe,  who  was 
[202] 


SHAKSPERE 
perhaps  in  his  own  passion  of  Ufe  more  at  one  with  the 
heart  of  the  Renaissance  than  was  Shakspere,  but  he 
was  less  nobly,  less  perfectly,  less  splendidly,  at  one  with 
it  in  its  manifold  fulness  of  expression.  Marlowe  first 
put  on  the  stage  the  career  of  great  passions,  characters 
of  immeasurable  ambition  and  unquenchable  thirst; 
but  in  "Tamerlane,"  "The  Jew  of  Malta"  and  "  Faus- 
tus, "  the  theme  is  not  sufficiently  correlated  with  the  real 
play  of  fact  and  force  in  human  affairs,  it  is  seized  %vith 
too  much  intellectual  abstraction  and  presented  too  spec- 
tacularly and  fragmentarily  in  the  scenes ;  some  experi- 
menting with  the  modifying  power  of  history  over  im- 
agination and  invention  was  needed  before  it  could  find 
its  dramatic  hmits  and  free  itself  from  fantasy,  enthusi- 
asm and  exaggeration  in  artistic  expression.  Shakspere 
followed  Marlowe  in  turning  to  EngHsh  history  for  the 
material  of  his  art.  The  idea  of  tragedy  was,  indeed,  al- 
ready defined  for  him  in  the  European  tradition  as  a 
tiling  of  the  fall  of  princes,  of  royal  misfortune  and  the 
vicissitude  of  splendid  fates ;  and  in  this  way  Shakspere's 
tragic  course  was  charted  out  for  him  beforehand ;  but  in 
working  out  dramatically  the  lots  of  the  English  kings 
he  also  kept  a  close  hold  on  the  idea  of  a  Hfe-force  in 
personahty  determining  temperament,  character  and 
the  issues  of  the  action.  What  in  Marlowe  was  extrava- 
gantly set  forth  as  the  fixed  idea  in  his  characters,  bear- 
[203] 


(JURAT  WRITERS 
ing  almost  the  impress  of  madness,  remains  in  Shaks- 
pere,  but  subdued  to  the  requirements  of  the  environ- 
ment and  of  human  nature,  to  probabiHty.  "  Richard 
II "  is  a  pathetic  instance  of  the  fall  of  a  prince,  but  the 
story  is  linked  with  that  infatuation  of  the  idea  of  di- 
vine right  which  is  the  dominant  idea  of  Richard, 
absorbs  the  eloquence,  grace  and  chivalry  of  his  nature 
and  contains  his  fate.  In  "  Richard  III,"  the  prepotency 
of  the  selfish  force  develops  its  bloody  way  with  a  power 
to  take  possession  of  the  king's  soul  that  recalls  the  self- 
maddening  tyranny  of  the  Roman  emperors,  till  he  be- 
comes the  fiend,  the  enemy  of  society  and  of  the  state  it- 
self, whose  fall  clears  the  air  like  a  departing  thunder- 
storm. Romeo  exhibits  the  mastering  of  passion  in  the 
youthful  soul;  love  in  him  is  ecstasy.  The  dominance  of 
the  personal  will,  possessed  by  an  idea  inciting  it,  assert- 
ing itself  with  unbridled  desire,  naturally  leads  to  mad- 
ness, and  in  Shakspere's  great  characters  of  this  sort 
mania  is  never  far  off;  in  Macbeth  there  is  the  capital  in- 
stance of  the  blending  of  the  borders  between  reason  and 
unreason,  and,  as  is  Shakspere's  way,  this  elemental 
trait  in  the  play  permeates  it,  objectified  in  the  witches, 
reduplicated  in  Lady  Macbeth,  but  concentrated  in 
the  \nvid  mental  action,  the  bodily  starts  and  stares,  the 
repeated  challenge  of  fate,  in  Macbeth's  shaking  but 
never  quite  dethroned  "state  of  man."  "Timon"  is  a 
[204] 


SHAKSPERE 
lesser  illustration.  "Hamlet"  and  "Lear"  thrust  this 
part  of  life  into  the  foreground;  and  in  "  Othello,"  the 
near  neighbourhood  of  the  excess  of  life  to  madness,  of  the 
noble  nature  to  ruin  through  its  own  power  to  live,  to  be 
possessed  by  a  passion,  an  idea,  a  sorrow,  is  the  ground 
of  its  tragic  scene.  The  personal  will  is  necessarily  anti- 
social, and  hence  opens  in  its  career  the  whole  field  of 
tragic  conflict  in  endless  ways ;  the  drama  is  its  natural 
scope  in  art,  and  there  it  is  the  most  potent  power  to  con- 
jure with;  it  is,  by  far,  the  most  interesting  thing  in  the 
whole  of  that  action  of  Ufe  which  Shakspere  contem- 
plated so  absorbingly.  The  Renaissance  spirit  concen- 
trated and  intensified  the  sense  of  it,  carried  it  to  the  ex- 
treme, made  an  ideal  of  it,  in  history;  Shakspere  took  it 
over  into  the  sphere  of  imagination  and  then  gave  such 
examples  of  it  in  the  transcendent  forms  of  art  that  his 
characters  became,  each  in  its  kind,  the  supreme  models 
of  what  is  possible  to  human  nature  and  faculty  in  per- 
sonal force,  the  types  of  man. 

The  fulness  of  fife  in  all  its  forms,  which  makes  the 
plays  great,  has  as  its  underlying  basis  this  life-force, 
the  afiirmation  of  fife,  in  its  energies,  its  desires,  its  reve- 
lations, in  the  conscious  spectacle  of  being,  and  with  the 
more  brilliancy  because  of  the  transcendent  ideaUzation 
to  which  the  scene  of  life  here  has  been  subjected.  All 
Shakspere's  male  characters  are  self-seekers,  in  a  true 
[205] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
sense;  the  exceptions,  Kent,  a  feudal  type,  and  Ho- 
ratio, a  modem  form  of  the  Kent  temperament,  are  also 
men  of  strength.  Though  with  the  visitation  of  thought, 
melancholy,  peculiar  misfortune  on  the  scene,  there  is 
occasionally  the  sense  of  a  withdrawal  from  life,  in 
Hamlet,  Antonio,  Hermione,  it  is  rather  a  forced  and 
regretful  retirement  than  a  true  withdrawal;  the  de- 
nial of  life  is  truly  present  in  Shakspere  only  as  an  un- 
shaped  suggestion.  The  age  was  one  of  action,  of  faith  in 
life,  and  the  ideals  it  projected  were  those  of  the  positive, 
achieving,  realizing  kind ;  and  in  Shakspere  the  hfe-force 
moved  in  his  world  of  art  with  the  f ruitfulness,  the  teem- 
ing variety,  the  creative  overflow  into  being  that  it  has  in 
nature.  Men  recognize  and  remember  this  hfe-force  in 
him  by  the  immortal  figures  of  the  plays,  Romeo, 
Hamlet,  Lear,  the  score  or  more  that  have  entered 
into  the  world's  memory  enduringly,  eternal  realities, 
with  ideal  fascination,  either  for  their  beauty  or  their 
intimacy  with  men's  bosoms  or  their  awe  in  fate  or  some 
other  mode  of  consanguinity  -wath  man  that  is  Shaks- 
pere's  seal  upon  them;  these  figures  best  illustrate  that 
power  of  life  and  will  to  hve,  in  high  personal  forms, 
showing  the  far  reach,  the  majesty,  the  pity  and  terror 
of  the  forces  of  life  in  the  soul  in  their  energy  accom- 
plishing the  utmost  possible  to  man  unfolding  his  na- 
ture in  the  vicissitudes  of  fortune;  but  the  whole  Shaks- 
[206] 


SHAKSPERE 
perian  world,  no  less  than  these,  in  its  various  planes  of 
character,  incident  and  plot,  is  the  outcome  and  reahza- 
tion  in  art  of  this  same  life-force  more  wadely  diffused  in 
humanity  of  every  kind  and  sort.  That  infinite  variety 
that  so  distinguishes  the  plays,  such  that  each  seems  a 
fresh  revelation  of  a  new  world,  so  embracing  that  they 
seem  in  their  wholeness  to  leave  no  lot  in  life  unex- 
pressed, no  mortal  joy  or  sorrow  unrecorded  in  its  own 
cry,  no  thought  almost  untold,— that  scene  of  Hfe  from  the 
tavern-companions  of  Falstaff  and  the  craftsmen  of 
Athens  up  to  the  sohtude  of  Caesar  in  power,  the  soli- 
tude of  Lear  in  grief,  the  solitude  of  Prospero  in  wis- 
dom, —  all  this  proceeds  from  the  Kfe-force  manifesting 
itself  with  the  multipHcity  and  abundance  of  humanity. 
Shakspere  engaged  his  mind  with  the  movement  of  hfe 
in  its  wholeness ;  he  let  the  Ufe-f orce  pour  through  him, 
from  clown  and  fool  and  trull  up  to  the  highest  incarna- 
tions of  the  will  in  passion,  wisdom,  sorrow,  the  types  of 
man;  and  this  seen  in  imagination  is  the  Shaksperian 
world.  He  was  not  an  observer,  bringing  back  word  from 
this  or  that  tract  of  life  or  group  of  mortals  or  peculiarity 
of  fortune;  he  was  a  creator  —  his  world  is  always 
whole,  as  entire  and  perfect  in  the  Indian  boy  of 
Titania  as  in  the  Rome  of  Caesar.  The  spirit  of  the 
Renaissance,  insatiable  for  life,  wliispered  to  him  this 
secret ;  but  in  the  act  and  passion  of  creation  he  exceeded 
[207] 


GREAT  WHITEHS 
the  Renaissance  and  took  his  station  with  those  might- 
iest few  who  are  not  for  an  age,  but  for  all  time. 

The  courtly  sphere,  the  aristocratic  ideal,  the  culmina- 
tion of  life  in  the  career  of  great  passions  led  up  to  that 
triumph  of  life  which  is  the  spectacle  the  Shaksperian 
world  presents  with  inexhaustible  profusion,  splendour 
and  vitality;  but  this  world,  though  an  emanation  of  the 
spirit  of  the  Renaissance  and  its  climax  in  literature, 
was  itself  sphered  in  a  larger  conception  universal  in  the 
tragic  art;  it  Ues,  like  the  antique  drama,  in  fatahty,  in 
the  mystery  and  under  the  sway  of  an  infinity  that  en- 
velops the  life-force  round  about  more  profoundly  and 
densely  than  the  dark  ether  envelops  the  forces  and 
imagery  of  nature.  The  prepotency  of  individuality, 
the  dominance  of  the  personal  will  are  the  great  forms  of 
life;  but  the  power  to  Uve,  however  supreme  in  its  mani- 
festation, is  a  wrestling  with  the  unseen  angel  of  life; 
and  to  Shakspere  in  the  long  and  brooding  absorption 
of  his  contemplation  of  the  action  of  Ufe  in  mortaUty, 
what  finally  emerges  from  the  strife  as  the  master-spirit 
there  is  the  dominance  of  fate  against  which  the  life- 
force  is  shattered.  It  is  commonly  said  that  fate  in  the 
antique  drama  is  external  and  operates  from  without  as 
destiny,  and  that  in  the  modern  drama  it  is  internal 
and  operates  from  ^\^tllin  as  character;  the  distinction 
brings  out  the  larger  scope  of  personahty  and  its  greater 
[  208  ] 


SHAKSPERE 
importance  in  the  romantic  drama  of  Shakspere;  but  in 
either  case  the  fatality  resides  in  the  action,  in  the  play 
of  the  forces  determining  the  tragic  catastrophe,  in  that 
which  is  essentially  beyond  and  outside  of  the  sphere  of 
the  personal  will  and  operates  free  from  its  control, 
against  its  desire  and  to  effect  its  ruin.  The  error,  the 
weakness,  the  cause  that  initiates  the  play  of  fate  may  be 
of  different  degrees  of  ignorance  or  consciousness,  of 
generosity  or  criminality,  of  responsibility  or  irresponsi- 
bility; but,  once  loosed  in  whatever  way,  fate  in  the  end 
rules  the  issue.  In  what  is  known  as  Shakspere's  period  of 
tragic  gloom,  that  is,  in  the  plays  of  his  manhood's  ma- 
turity, in  which  his  creative  genius  works  with  its  most 
profound  power  in  realizing  the  states  of  the  soul,  the 
characteristic  trait  is  the  gradual  emergence  in  his  art  of 
the  sense  of  fate  in  the  world,  its  accumulation  in  his 
mind,  its  possession  of  his  genius  which  then  gave  forth 
those  dramas  on  which  his  fame  as  a  master  of  the 
knowledge  of  life  most  rests  and  in  which  fate  controls  the 
scene  of  life  in  the  wreck  of  fortune,  the  riving  of  the 
soul  within,  the  catastrophe  where  tragic  death  load- 
ing the  stage  impresses  the  mind  less  as  the  penalty  than 
as  a  release  of  the  sufferer  from  the  power  of  life  to 
torture  and  betray,  a  dismissal  of  the  soul  to  the  peace 
where  hfe  is  not.  To  Macbeth,  Othello,  Lear  and 
also  to  Hamlet,  death  is  welcome;  and  to  the  spectator 
[209] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
also  their  death  brings  relief,  calm,  peace.  Shakspere, 
in  these  days  pre-eminently  saw  fate  as  that  against 
which  personality  is  shattered,  not  merely  dramatically 
by  a  star-crossed  fortvme  as  in  Romeo,  with  the  pathos 
of  the  death  of  youth,  beauty  and  passion,  but  more  es- 
sentially as  by  a  law  inherent  in  the  greatness  of  the  life- 
force  itself  to  destroy  it;  for  these  are  not  special  but 
typical  instances  of  the  action  of  life  —  slight  changes  of 
circumstances  might  have  altered  the  fortunes  of  Ro- 
meo, but  no  change  could  ever  have  altered  the  fate  of 
Macbeth,  Othello,  Lear,  Hamlet.  In  these  four  Shaks- 
pere sets  personality  against  fate,  front  to  front,  and  the 
story  is  felt  to  be  a  universal  chapter  of  Ufe,  of  the  im- 
plication of  the  human  spirit  in  that  ^^cissitude  of  na- 
ture and  fortune  which  has  in  every  tongue  borne  the 
same  name  and  that  is  stronger  than  life. 

The  realization  that  such  is  the  nature  of  human  Hfe 
was  attended  in  Shakspere's  mind  by  a  storm  and 
stress  that  is  read  not  only  in  the  great  dramas,  but  also 
in  the  cynical  acquaintance  with  humanity  shown  in 
"  All's  Well  that  Ends  Well, "  and  in  the  savage  temper 
toward  its  baseness  displayed  in  "Troilus  and  Cres- 
sida. "  The  concentrated,  intense,  ideal  realization  of 
the  tragedy  of  existence,  of  humanity  Nictimized  in  its 
forms  of  noblest  nature  or  of  most  superb  power,  though 
most  brilliant  in  the  four  great  tragedies,  is  not  confined 
[210] 


SHAKSPERE 
to  them ;  it  extends  and  spreads  into  many  others  in  dif- 
ferent planes  of  character,  mood  and  thought.  The 
action  of  Hfe  takes  on  that  quaUty  of  impenetrable 
mystery  which  the  face  of  life  has  always  worn,  in  every 
literature,  in  the  liighest  works  of  imagination.  Mys- 
tery is  an  increasing  element  in  Shakspere's  dramas 
from  the  first,  continuing,  growing  in  depth,  growing  also 
in  intangibihty ;  poetically,  it  is  etherealized  in  "  A  Mid- 
summer Night's  Dream  "  full  of  the  idea  of  illusion  in  art 
as  the  wood  is  of  moonlight;  reflectively,  it  is  precipitat- 
ed in  Hamlet's  thought;  and,  at  the  end,  as  the  illusion 
of  life  it  fills  "  The  Tempest ; "  but  the  finer  and  most  se- 
cret form  of  mystery  in  Shakspere  is  not  poetical  or 
intellectual  or  metaphysical,  but  springs  from  the  action 
itself  and  is  dramatic.  It  is  in  Macbeth's  superstitious 
interrogation  of  the  witches,  in  Hamlet's  questioning  of 
the  soul  in  his  soliloquy,  in  thoso.  half -lines  of  tragic 
climax  where  life  grows  silent  before  the  presence  of 
fate ;  it  is  in  Othello's  mind-dazed  question : 

"  Will  you,  I  pray,  demand  that  demi-devil 
Why  he  hath  thus  ensnared  my  soul  and  body,"  — 

the  mystery  of  the  fates  of  man ;  it  is  in  Lear's  invocation 
of  the  elements: 

"  I  never  gave  you  kingdom,  called  you  children,"  — 

dismissing  them  from  the  moral  world  as  if  they  alone 
[211] 


GREAT  Wiai'EliS 
were  free  where  all  was  guiltiness  in  the  worse  storm  of 
life  beating  on  his  white,  old  head.  It  is  in  such  passages  as 
these,  where  Shakspere's  dramatic  faculty  is  at  its  light- 
ning-stroke that  the  inner  secrecy  of  the  mystery  is  light- 
ed up,  shown  but  not  revealed,  in  the  depth  of  conscious- 
ness. Reason  has  no  solvent  for  it,  justice  does  not  meas- 
ure with  it,  mercy  is  unknown  to  it.  The  attempt  to  make 
fate  ethical  in  Shakspere,  to  identify  it  with  moral  law  in 
the  universe,  however  it  be  made,  fails;  it  was  not  as 
righteousness  that  he  saw  hfe;  he  saw  it  with  the  simple- 
ness  of  his  genius,  as  a  dramatic  struggle,  and,  emerg- 
ing thence,  the  dominance  of  fate  shattering  life  mys- 
teriously, beyond  the  intelligible  grasp  of  man's  reason 
or  the  moral  sense.  He  saw,  in  other  words,  above  all  else, 
the  dramatic  mystery  of  life. 

Shakspere  was  thus,  through  and  through,  a  drama- 
tist; and  he  was  the  dramatist  in  whom  the  old  tradition 
of  the  art,  even  from  iEschylus,  as  a  representative  of 
the  courtly  life  and  a  tale  of  the  fall  of  princes,  cul- 
minated. The  idea  of  humanity,  in  the  modern  demo- 
cratic sense,  was  never  in  his  brain ;  the  types  of  man  that 
he  created  were,  in  their  greatness,  those  of  the  aristo- 
cratic life;  and  the  tragedy  he  set  forth  was  not  that  of 
the  spirit  of  life,  the  modern  world-pain,  but  of  the  ca- 
reers of  individuals  highly  endowed  by  nature  or  fortune 
in  a  world  which  seemed  to  exist  to  be  the  theatre 
[212] 


SHAKSPERE 
of  their  will,  ambition,  passion;  he  was  the  dramatist 
of  a  class-society.  The  aristocratic  ideal  of  society 
and  of  action  in  it,  however,  is  the  will  of  nature,  and 
still  prevails  in  every  state ;  and  it  makes  a  universal  ap- 
peal to  men.  The  ground  of  this  appeal  is  little  affected 
by  the  absence  in  Shakspere  of  dramatic  sympathy ;  for 
the  scene  of  Ufe  which  he  does  present  includes  all 
classes ;  human  nature  is  common  and  constant,  and  the 
career  of  life  in  fortune,  ambition,  passion  is  now  the 
same  that  he  depicted;  the  Shaksperian  world,  however 
modern  conditions  may  be  changed,  is  still  Ufe  as  it  is 
known  to  the  thoughts  of  men.  The  dramatic  mystery  is 
that  which  is  closest  to  mankind  in  daily  experience,  the 
mystery  of  what  is  done,  of  what  happens ;  the  poetic,  in- 
tellectual, metaphysical  modes  of  mystery  exist  for  the 
few,  but  the  mystery  of  the  event  itself  is  for  all,  and  it  is 
seized  by  them  in  Shakspere's  way  as  not  a  thing  of  rea- 
son or  ethics,  but  as  a  fact  impenetrable,  leaving  the  soul 
according  to  its  degree  affected  by  the  scene.  Tliis  is  the 
normal  human  attitude  toward  calamity,  toward  trag- 
edy, of  any  kind ;  its  force  expends  itself  not  in  explana- 
tion, but  in  experience.  The  sense  of  life  as  action,  too, 
and  the  ideal  of  it  as  lying  in  the  prepotency  of  individ- 
uality, and  the  dominance  of  the  personal  will  is  natural 
to  all  men,  and  the  thing  dearest  to  their  bosoms  as  their 
thought  and  desire  of  life;  the  power  to  live, —  to  loose 
[213] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
the  energies  of  the  soul  in  achievement,  enjoyment,  ex- 
perience, to  affirm  Hfe  in  its  fuhiess,  variety,  richness,  in- 
tensely, extremely  insatiably,  to  the  utmost  of  the  force 
that  is  in  one  —  this  is  the  impulse  to  self-expression,  to 
self-realization,  that  drives  men  in  their  ambitions  and 
passions  of  whatever  nature,  the  action  and  movement 
of  life  in  the  world ;  and  in  this  world  as  it  Hes  outspread 
in  the  knowledge  and  thoughts  of  men  brilliant  personal 
force  most  attracts  admiration,  confers  fame  and  secures 
imitation,  oftenest  without  regard  to  moral  quahty. 
Force  is  the  idol  of  hfe  that  is  hardest  to  combat  in  civ- 
ihzing  man.  In  the  Shaksperian  w^orld  the  affirmation  of 
life  in  general  is  as  broadly  various  as  in  the  world  of 
nature,  and  in  individual  types  it  reaches  a  height  of 
beauty,  power  and  majesty  that  is  unrivalled  in  nature 
because  seen  through  the  ideality  of  art,  and  these  types 
have  a  history  and  a  revelation  of  their  being  such  as  is 
only  possible  in  imagination;  men,  consequently,  pass- 
ing into  this  world  as  they  read  or  behold  the  plays  jSnd 
there  that  enlargement  of  life  and  its  career,  that  inten- 
sification and  revelation  of  it,  which,  though  denied  to 
their  experience,  truly  endows  them  with  the  greatness 
of  life,  gives  them  understanding  of  the  soul  and  the  fac- 
ulties lodged  in  it,  the  heights  and  depths  of  its  passion, 
the  reaches  of  its  thoughts,  the  shadows  of  fatahty  amid 
which  it  moves  under  the  stars.  The  universal  appeal  of 
[214] 


SHAKSPERE 
Shakspere  lies  in  the  power  with  which  he  has  seized  Ufe 
in  its  intense  forms,  its  richest  efflorescence,  its  magical 
fantasy,  its  fascination  and  horror,  its  vulgar  generaUty, 
its  high  types,  its  manias  and  humours,  the  whole  of 
life,  and  given  it  back  to  men  as  an  increase  of  their  own 
power  to  live,  a  world  in  which  they  come  to  true  con- 
sciousness of  themselves.  Life  is  what  men  desire; 
Shakspere  gives  them  life,  according  to  their  own  ideal, 
the  triumph  of  life,  yet  Ufe  which  at  its  height  is  tragic 
and  shocks  them  with  that  mystery  of  the  actual  which 
is  the  profoundest  reahty. 

The  secret  of  life  solves  the  riddle  of  Shakspere, 
whose  greatness  has  no  other  mystery  than  the  mystery 
of  the  greatness  of  hfe.  He  is  the  spirit  of  life  made 
manifest  in  its  own  dramatic  motion,  imprisoned,  em- 
bodied and  unveiled  in  art.  Here  are  the  fates  of  men, 
grotesque,  heroic,  terrible,  or  stately  in  prosperity  with 
the  olive  crown  and  the  sheaf  of  Ceres,  almost  as  many 
in  number  as  the  lots  set  forth  to  be  chosen  by  the  souls 
at  birth.  It  is  an  earthly  life  limited  to  the  mortal  scene ; 
no  illumination  falls  on  it  from  heaven,  no  divinity  in- 
habits its  sphere.  It  is  essentially  Pagan  in  its  ideal,  its 
art  and  its  philosophy.  It  is  the  supreme  work  of  man's 
hand  so  rendering  life  in  its  aspects  of  mortality.  If  one 
were  to  mould  in  sculpture  the  face  of  life,  it  would  be, 
one  thinks,  that  over  which  every  joy  and  sorrow,  every 
[215] 


GREAT  WRITERS 
thought  seems  to  have  moved  —  the  infinite  of  human 
expression  —  leaving  its  trace  in  the  hving  flesh,  —  the 
face  of  Shakspere.  That  would  be,  could  it  be  won  back 
from  time,  the  ideal  face  of  Ufe,  the  Sphinx  of  our 
existence. 

THE  END 


THE     HoCLDRB     PRESS,     NEW     TORK 

[216] 


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DEC  2  fi 
APR  2 

MAR  1  0 


APR 


1  . 


1965 


MAR     ^ 


1964 

933  4 
71964 

i965 


J 


HAR  1<> 


986 


^-^R  ^_  L1969  5 


NOV 


1973 


.^OV 


i>J73  9 


.CCTl 


ji*^ 


7  1974  4 


MAR  1 0  1^76 


Tlr^ 


8  1976  6 


~OEU-J 


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d 


Library  Buttau  Cat.  No.  1137 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


AA    001  284  907   1 


'||||)lllll11jlllPlni?fil,K,'?,flP,f.'-.BRARy 


3  1210  00741  7932 


